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Patrick Meier: Introducing GeoXray for Crisis Mapping

Introducing GeoXray for Crisis Mapping My colleague Joel Myhre recently pointed me to Geosemble’s GeoXray platform, which “automatically filters content to your geographic area of interest and to your keywords of interest to provide you with timely, relevant information that enables you and your organization to make better decisions faster.” While I haven’t tested the platform, …

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Patrick Meier: Evaluating the Impact of SMS on Behavior Change

Evaluating the Impact of SMS on Behavior Change The purpose of PeaceTXT is to use mobile messaging (SMS) to catalyze behavior change vis-a-vis peace and conflict issues for the purposes of violence prevention. You can read more about our pilot project in Kenya here. We’re hoping to go live next month with some initial trials. In …

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Patrick Meier: Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge

Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge I have been writing and blogging about “information forensics” for a while now and thus relished Nieman Report’s must-read study on “Truth in the Age of Social Media.” My applied research has specifically been on the use of social media to support …

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Patrick Meier: Become a (Social Media) Data Donor and Save a Life

Become a (Social Media) Data Donor and Save a Life I was recently in New York where I met up with my colleague Fernando Diaz from Microsoft Research. We were discussing the uses of social media in humanitarian crises and the various constraints of social media platforms like Twitter vis-a-vis their Terms of Service. And then this …

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Patrick Meier: Enhanced Messaging for the Emergency Response Sector (EMERSE)

Enhanced Messaging for the Emergency Response Sector (EMERSE) My colleague Andrea Tapia and her team at PennState University have developed an interesting iPhone application designed to support humanitarian response. This application is part of their EMERSE project: Enhanced Messaging for the Emergency Response Sector. The other components of EMERSE include a Twitter crawler, automatic classification and …

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Patrick Meier: Crisis Tweets – Natural Language Processing to the Rescue?

Crisis Tweets: Natural Language Processing to the Rescue? My colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder, have been doing some very interesting applied research on automatically extracting “situational awareness” from tweets generated during crises. As is increasingly recognized by many in the humanitarian space, Twitter can at times be an important source of relevant information. The …

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Patrick Meier: Situational Awareness in Mass Emergency – Behavioral & Linguistic Analysis of Disaster Tweets [Thin Thread for Twitter]

Situational Awareness in Mass Emergency: Behavioral & Linguistic Analysis of Disaster Tweets Sarah Vieweg‘s doctoral dissertation from the University of Colorado is a must-read for anyone interested in the use of twitter during crises. I read the entire 300-page study because it provides important insights on how automated natural language processing (NLP) can be applied to …

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