Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research

Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research

Social Media in Crisis Management Babak Akhgar and Helen Gibson Basic Training Course on Earthquake Engineering 3rd December 2015 Social and Economic Impacts of Earthquakes

What is CENTRIC? ■ CENTRIC, Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research, is a multidisciplinary and end-user driven Centre of Excellence, located within Sheffield Hallam University, UK. ■ – – – – – – –

Our research is focused on Counter-Terrorism and Organised Crime Social Media and Crisis Management Cybercrime and Cyber-Terrorism Strategic Intelligence Management Trafficking human beings and public order Intelligence and Community Oriented Policing OSINT and situational awareness

CENTRIC Advisory Board

Critical Incident Analysis Group and two other security agencies

Ongoing Projects ePOOLICE Environmental scanning for organised crime threats

Athena Situation assessment and crowd sourcing for crisis management

COURAGE Defining the future research agenda for cybercrime and cyber-terrorism

TRANSRAD Understanding radicalisation

SMART-CV Combating radicalization using credible voices

UINFC2 Detection and removal of indecent content related to CSE

Unity Community policing in Europe

AUGGMED Applied gaming for law enforcement

Common Project Characteristics ■ Large Data-sets (3Vs principals - Large Volume of data, Large variety of data and large velocity of data) ■ Application OSINT ■ Data Visualisation ■ Enhance Decision Making Capability ■ Predictive Analytics ■ Situational awareness ■ And most importantly, developing relevant knowledge and actionable intelligence for law enforcement and security agencies.

Social Media in Crisis Management ■ Social Media used to report on all kinds of situations ■ Writing tweets and Facebook posts, posting images and videos to Instagram, Vine, Snapchat. Live reporting through Periscope.

Social Media in Crisis Management ■ Reporting on crisis situations attracts a large amount of social media traffic ■ Containing information relevant to the police, and other emergency services as well as the public ■ However, the monitoring, curation and representation of this data in a useful format is a complex problem. – – – – – –

large amounts of data misinformation repeated information non-verified information links to news articles, people commenting but not contributing

IT enabled Situational Awareness ■ During a crisis police, emergency responders and others need to understand what is happening and fast ■ Traditionally through information arriving to the command and control centre

IT enabled Situational Awareness ■ Traditional systems are slow to collect intelligence ■ Many ordinary citizens are highly motivated to contribute during crisis situations but don't know how to ■ The rise in smart phone usage means many people are constantly connected and online ■ Those on the scene both citizens and first responders need up-to-date, relevant and actionable information accurately and quickly

Athena Project ■ ATHENA explores how the huge popularity of new communication media can be harnessed to provide efficient and effective communication and enhanced situational awareness during a crisis for citizens and first responders ■ How can we use social media, mobile application and smart communication devices to communication more effectively in a crisis? ■ How can we improve two-way communication in a crisis? ■ How do we effectively and efficiently process this data to turn it into actionable intelligence to manage the crisis situation better? ■ How can we harness the enthusiasm of citizens?

Athena Project ■ Develop prototype software tools to enhance the ability of LEAs, police, first responders and citizens in their use of mobile and smart devices in crisis situations

Athena Mobile Application  Reporting and monitoring application for citizens and first responders  Submit eyewitness reports, request help, monitor other reports  Communicates with the CCCID  Additional restricted features for officials (e.g., first responders, trusted users, etc.)

Athena Mobile Application ■ View events and reports in your area ■ Drill down into event details ■ View associated maps, images, videos and audio recordings ■ Headlines and Press releases

Athena Mobile Application ■ Citizens can report incidents directly ■ Attach locations, text, photos, video, audio

Athena Command and Control Dashboard ■

Sits in the command and control centre and receives information from the app

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Navigation through the various Athena CCCID features.

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Filtering and manipulation of displayed data.

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News List showing all current and recent reports and headlines.

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Crisis Map showing all current and recent reports as categorical pins.

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Popup windows providing more information about the report or headline, including editable states (such as read/unread, validated/ unvalidated/ rejected, user tier etc).

Athena Command and Control Dashboard  Command and Control can upload reports and press releases  Add headlines to appear in the app  Validate and verify incoming reports  Mark reports as public/private

Athena Command and Control Dashboard

■ Define key locations for citizens ■ Identify danger zones ■ Provide advanced analytics

Athena - Social Media Information Processing ■ Lots of social media activity during a crisis ■ Millions of tweets posted ■ Unstructured textual information

Text data e.g. Tweets

Categorisation

Entity Extraction

Sentiment Analysis

Athena - Social Media Information Processing ■ Categorisation – Labelling our incoming tweets with one or more categories

Attack

Crime

Explosion

Fire

Hazard

Infrastructure

Medical

Natural Disaster

Public Order

Transport

Help

Athena - Social Media Information Processing ■ Entity Extraction – Identifying particular specific events e.g. shooting, earthquake, avalanche, etc. – Alongside locations, people, organisations, etc.

https://twitter.com/newborn786/status/591896994895024128

Athena - Social Media Information Processing ■ Clustering – Having identified categories and entities we need to group all these sources to make sense of them – Tweets with the same categories and entities extracted are clustered into groups with similar tweets by a process called Formal Concept Analysis – The more tweets a group has the more reliable the information may be Categories: Infrastructure Event: damage Locations: Nepal What: building

Categories: avalanche, earthquake, attack-killing Event: earthquake Locations: nepal, Event: People dead Locations: nepal,

Categories: earthquake, avalanche Event: avalanche Locations: mount everest, Event: earthquake Locations: nepal, Frequency:246

Nepal Earthquake Case Study ■ Example of how we might use social media data during a crisis situation such as an earthquake ■ 25th April 2015, 7.8 magnitude earthquake hits Nepal ■ Collected almost 1 million tweets using the search terms katmandu, everest, nepalquake, and nepalearthquake. ■ Removal of duplicate tweets left 165,715 tweets to analyse

Nepal Earthquake - Tweet Analysis Category

Count

Earthquake

1484

Avalanche

1107

Killing

1059

Medical

371

Infrastructure

177

Landslide

65

Nepal Earthquake - Tweet Analysis ■

Earthquake

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Killing

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People Trapped

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Ambulance

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People Dead

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Violence

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Medical

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People Leaving From

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Avalanche

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People Injured

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People Sick

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Volcano

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Damage

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People Need Help

■

Blocked

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Hostage Take

Common Locations • Nepal • Katmandu • Mount Everest • Mount Everest Base Camp • India • Himalayas

A climber on Mount Everest captured... ... footage of an avalanche that killed at least 18 people on the mountain

Nepal Earthquake - Tweet Analysis

Nepal Earthquake - Tweet Analysis

Nepal Earthquake - Tweet Analysis ■ Even those not on social media can provide information that adds to the conversation ■

Important to get the first hand accounts

■ Want to ignore retweeting news stories and those not providing information that increase situational awareness

Athena ■ Crisis management system for situational awareness using social media and smart mobile applications. ■ Next steps – Integration of the social media with mobile application and the full dashboard – Testing in a real-live play exercises (environmental natural disaster and terrorism) – Developing methods for credibility and priority analysis – Advanced filtering, exploration and visual analysis tools ■

More information at www.projectathena.eu

[email protected] research.shu.ac.uk/centric [email protected] [email protected]