Public Intelligence Blog

Verily: Crowdsourcing Evidence During Disasters

Social media is increasingly used for communicating during crises. This rise in Big (Crisis) Data means that finding the proverbial needle in the growing haystack of information is becoming a major challenge. Social media use during Hurricane Sandy produced a “haystack” of half-a-million Instagram photos and 20 million tweets. But which of these were actually relevant for disaster response and could they have been detected in near real-time? The purpose of QCRI’s experimental Twitter Dashboard for Disaster Response project is to answer this question. But what about the credibility of the needles in the info-stack?

To answer this question, our Crisis Computing Team at QCRI has partnered with the Social Computing & Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. This applied research project began with a series of conversations in mid-2012 about DARPA’s Red Balloon Challenge. This challenge posted in 2009 offered $40K to the individual or team that could find the correct location of 10 red weather balloons discretely placed across the continental United States, an area covering well over 3 million square miles (8 million square kilometers). My friend Riley Crane at MIT spearheaded the team that won the challenge in 8 hours and 52 minutes by using social media.

Riley and I connected right after the Haiti Earthquake to start exploring how we might apply his team’s winning strategy to disaster response. But we were pulled in different directions due to PhD & post-doc obligations and start-up’s. Thank-fully, however, Riley’s colleague Iyad Rahwan got in touch with me to continue these conversations when I joined QCRI. Iyad is now at the Masdar Institute. We’re collaborating with him and his students to apply collective intelligence insights from the balloon to address the problem of false or misleading content shared on social media during  disasters.

If 10 balloons planted across 3 million square miles can be found in under 9 hours, then surely the answer to the question “Did Hurricane Sandy really flood this McDonald’s in Virginia?” can be found in under 9 minutes given that  Virginia is 98% smaller than the “haystack” of the continental US. Moreover, the location of the restaurant would already be known or easily findable. The picture below, which made the rounds on social media during the hurricane is in reality part of an art exhibition produced in 2009. One remarkable aspect of the social media response to Hurricane Sandy was how quickly false information got debunked and exposed as false—not only by one good (digital) Samaritan, but by several.

Read full article with graphics.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Verily: Crowdsourcing Evidence During Disasters”