Friday

Wright State Newsroom

November 21, 2014

Wright
State
research
seeks
sense
from
social
media
to
aid
in
emergencies
By Timothy R. Gaffney
November 14, 2011

Just hours after a powerful earthquake killed hundreds of people in Turkey and left
thousands homeless Oct. 23, thousands of others were offering shelter via Twitter
and email.
The online outpouring of aid was reported by the British newspaper the Guardian. Its
just one example of how the use of social media is reshaping the way people respond
to natural disasters and other large-scale emergencies. But a Wright State University
professor believes weve just scratched the surface of its potential.
Amit Sheth, Ph.D., leads a collaborative team of Wright State and Ohio State
University researchers who are developing new ways to extract meaningful
information from hundreds of thousands of Twitter and other messages as they are
posted during emergencies.
Their work is in a growing field sometimes called Web 3.0 or Semantic Web. The
National Science Foundation is funding the research under a $750,000 Social
Computational Systems (SoCS) program grant that includes $480,000 to Wright

Online social networks and Internetconnected mobile devices such as

smart phones have created an
immense opportunity that empowers
citizens and organizations to
communicate and coordinate
effectively in the wake of critical
events, Amit Sheth says.

State and $270,000 to Ohio State. The research involves both computer scientists
and social scientists.
Large-scale emergencies typically involve a wide variety of stakeholders, says Sheth, Wright States
LexisNexis Eminent Scholar and director of Kno.e.sis, the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled
Computing. You have affected parties that need help, you have government organizations, and you have
non-government organizations, or NGOs. You have NGOs that specialize in medical support. Others do food
and shelter, and so on, he says.
All of these stakeholders need information, but solid information can be hard to get in the chaotic first hours or
days of an emergency.
The solution requires extracting not just data but meaning from the Internet. Doing that has been a decade-
long focus of Kno.e.sis, where Sheth, his colleagues and students have developed groundbreaking tools and
methods. SoCS is the latest of several projects there.
Online social networks and Internet-connected mobile devices such as smart
phones have created an immense opportunity that empowers citizens and
organizations to communicate and coordinate effectively in the wake of critical
events, Sheth says.
For example, when earthquakes recently struck Haiti, Japan and China, and
when flooding ravaged parts of Pakistan, people used Twitter and text
messaging to report conditions and coordinate aid efforts. In any emergency,
any disaster, these days you see the use of social media, Sheth says. You

The SoCS project seeks to leverage Twitter

posts or tweets as the primary source of
information from citizens.

see it in developed worlds and you see it in developing worlds.

The SoCS project seeks to leverage Twitter posts or tweets as the primary source of information from
citizens. The scientists will analyze the tweet content using semantic content analysis and other advanced
techniques to squeeze out meaningful information that could be useful to citizens or aid organizations. Human
role players will act on the results in small-scale simulations to test their effectiveness.
How, for example, do you understand what needs there are? Where should we channel the needs? How
would people who have some capacity to do public goodsay some limited medical capacity to support a
medical teambe best utilized? How can NGOs coordinate with government so that they could be more
effective? asks Sheth.
These are vital questions, but getting meaningful answers by sifting through thousands of tweets isnt a simple
task.
In emergencies, people try to communicate rapidly. But its important to understand the meanings in
messages, says Hemant Purohit, Prof. Sheths Ph.D. advisee. Purohit is one of several graduate students
working on the project. He says tweets typically are imprecise and often contain abbreviations, hyperlinks and
other content that challenge automated analysis techniques.
Says Sheth, Well be studying the ability to understand what people are asking for, ability to understand what
people can offer, how to connect the people, what words they could use, and how we could lead them to
better use social media. Sheth believes this research can lead to valuable insights on effective use of social
media during emergencies.
In the meantime, he says, the SoCS project offers cutting-edge research opportunities for students in a
growing field that needs their skills. We supply top talent locally and globally, he says.
Sheth says the project is very exciting for himself and Kno.e.sis because of the interdisciplinary collaboration
with John Flach, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Psychology, and Valerie Shalin, Ph.D.,
associate professor of psychology, both at Wright State, and Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Ph.D., a professor in
the departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Biomedical Informatics at Ohio State University.
Read more about SoCS and the Semantic Social Web at http://knoesis.wright.edu
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