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Patrick Meier: Comparing the Quality of Crisis Tweets Versus 911 Emergency Calls

Comparing the Quality of Crisis Tweets Versus 911 Emergency Calls In 2010, I published this blog post entitled “Calling 911: What Humanitarians Can Learn from 50 Years of Crowdsourcing.” Since then, humanitarian colleagues have become increasingly open to the use of crowdsourcing as a methodology to  both collect and process information during disasters.  I’ve been studying …

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Patrick Meier: Optimizing Distributed Collaboration for Live Crisis Mapping

Optimizing Distributed Collaboration for Live Crisis Mapping My colleague Duncan Watts recently spoke with Scientific American about a  new project I am collaborating on with him & colleagues at Microsoft Research. I first met Duncan while at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) back in 2006. We recently crossed paths again (at 10 Downing Street, of all places), and …

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Patrick Meier: UN, Social Media, HUMINT, and Geospatial Decision-Support –a REAL Revolution in Intelligence Affairs

How the UN Used Social Media in Response to Typhoon Pablo Our mission as digital humanitarians was to deliver a detailed dataset of pictures and videos (posted on Twitter) which depicted the damage and flooding following the Typhoon. An overview of this digital response is available here. The task of our United Nations colleagues at the Office of the …

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Patrick Meier: Using E-Mail Data to Estimate International Migration Rates

Using E-Mail Data to Estimate International Migration Rates As is well known, “estimates of demographic flows are inexistent, outdated, or largely inconsistent, for most countries.” I would add costly to that list as well. So my QCRI colleague Ingmar Weber co-authored a very interesting study on the use of e-mail data to estimate international migration rates. The study a large sample …

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Patrick Meier: Rapidly Verifying Source Credibility on Twitter

Rapidly Verifying the Credibility of Information Sources on Twitter One of the advantages of working at QCRI is that I’m regularly exposed to peer-reviewed papers presented at top computing conferences. This is how I came across an initiative called “Seriously Rapid Source Review” or SRSR. As many iRevolution readers know, I’m very interested in information forensics …

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Patrick Meier: Twitter Maps and Videos Showing Hurricane Sandy in Real-Time, with Geospatial and Substance Tags

The Most Impressive Live Global Twitter Map, Ever? My colleague Kalev Leetaru has just launched The Global Twitter Heartbeat Project  in partnership with the Cyber Infrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory (CIGI) and GNIP. He shared more information on this impressive initiative with the CrisisMappers Network this morning. According to Kalev, the project “uses an SGI super-computer to visualize …

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