Keynote Speakers
This year we will have two keynote speakers: Daniele Quercia and Ken Anderson.
Towards Next-Generation Software Infrastructure for Crisis Informatics Research (Ken Anderson)
Crisis Informatics is a multidisciplinary research area that examines the socio-technical relationships among people, information, and technology during mass emergency events. One area of crisis informatics examines the on-line behaviors of members of the public making use of social media during a crisis event to make sense of it, to report on it, and, in some cases, to coordinate a response to it either locally or from afar. In order to study those behaviors, this social media data has to be systematically captured and stored in a scalable and reliable way for later analysis. Project EPIC is a large U.S. National Science Foundation funded project that has been performing crisis informatics research since Fall 2009 and has been designing and developing a reliable and robust software infrastructure for the storage and analysis of large crisis informatics data sets.
Social Media for Cold Management
(Daniele Quercia)
Social media has been increasingly used to manage emergencies (hot management), yet it is still unclear to which extent its use is truly beneficial to manage calm situations (cold management). Take socioeconomic deprivation of cities. Measuring it in an accurate and timely fashion has become a priority for governments around the world. Traditionally, deprivation indexes have been derived from census data, which is however very expensive to obtain, and thus acquired only every few years. In recent years, we have proposed alternative computational methods to automatically extract proxies of deprivation at a fine spatio-temporal level of granularity. We have also proposed new ways of determining which streets are safe from crime and which are walkable, and ways of profiling the functional and temporal uses of cities. All this only requires access to freely available user-generated content (on, e.g., Foursquare, OpenStreetMap, Flickr), and, as such, is complementary to the use of expensive proprietary data and outdated governmental data.
Daniele Quercia is a computer scientist, has been named one of Fortune magazine's 2014 Data All-Stars, and spoke about "happy maps" at TED. Dr. Quercia is interested in the relationship between online and offline worlds, and his work has been focusing in the areas of data mining, computational social science, and urban informatics. He was a Research Scientist at Yahoo Labs, a Horizon senior researcher at The Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, and Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his PhD from UC London. His thesis was sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge and was nominated for BCS Best British PhD dissertation in Computer Science.Website: http://researchswinger.org/
Ken Anderson has led the research and development in this software engineering effort and will discuss the challenges (both technical and social) that Project EPIC faced in developing its software infrastructure, known as EPIC Collect and EPIC Analyze. EPIC Collect has been in 24/7 operation in various forms since Spring 2010 and has collected terabytes of social media data across hundreds of mass emergency events since that time. EPIC Analyze is a data analysis platform for large social media data sets that provides efficient browsing, filtering, and collaborative annotation services. Prof. Anderson will discuss these systems and also present the challenges of collecting and analyzing social media data (with an emphasis on Twitter data) at scale. Project EPIC has designed and evaluated software architectural styles that can be adopted by other research groups to help develop their own capacity to work in this space. Prof. Anderson will conclude the talk with a vision for future work in this area: What's next for crisis informatics software infrastructure?
Slides: Dropbox link.
Website: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~kena/