SoCS: Social Media Enhanced Organizational Sensemaking in Emergency Response

Online social networks and always-connected mobile devices have created an immense opportunity that empowers citizens and organizations to communicate and coordinate effectively in the wake of critical events. Specifically, there have been many isolated examples of using Twitter to provide timely and situational information about emergencies to relief organizations, and to conduct ad-hoc coordination. However, there are few attempts that try to understand the full ramifications of using social networks in a more concerted manner for effective organizational sensemaking in such contexts. This multi-disciplinary project, spanning computational and social sciences, seeks to fill this gap.
This project seeks to leverage Twitter posts (tweets) as the primary source of citizen inputs and couple relevant content and network information along with microworld simulations involving human role players to measure effectiveness of various organized sensemaking strategies. To arrive at meaningful summaries of citizen input, tweet content is analyzed using a semantic content analysis by combining natural language techniques that are suitably fused with existing knowledge bases (GeoNames, Wikipedia). Content analysis is further enhanced by innovatively combining it with the dynamic analysis of the twitter network to realize concise and trustworthy information nuggets of potential interest to organizations and citizens. The resulting summaries will be fed to a suitably designed microworld simulation involving human actors to derive realistic settings for modeling disaster situations and typical organizational structures.
This project is expected to have a significant impact in the specific context of disaster and emergency response. However, elements of this research are expected to have much wider utility, for example in the domains of e-commerce, and social reform. From a computational perspective, this project introduces the novel paradigm of people-content-network analysis whose application is not just limited to organized sensemaking. For social scientists, it provides a platform that can be used to assess relative efficacy of various organizational structures using microworld simulations and is expected to provide new insights into the types of social network structures (mix of symmetric and asymmetric) that might be better suitable to propagate information in emergent situations. From an educational standpoint, the majority of funds will be used to train the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers drawn from the computational and social sciences. Participation of underrepresented groups, especially women, will be encouraged, and is anticipated. Datasets and software developed as part of this project will be made available to the broader research community here.
Keywords: Social Networking, Emergency Response, Content Analysis, Network Analysis, Organizational Sensemaking, Collaborative Decision Making, Seeking-Supplying Intent Mining, User Engagement, Coordination.
Collaborative team of Wright State University (WSU) and Ohio State University (OSU):

• WSU PI/PM: Prof. Amit Sheth
• WSU Co-PIs: Prof. Valerie Shalin, Prof. John Flach (Department of Psychology, Human Factors/Industrial Organization Graduate Program)
• OSU PI: Prof. Srinivasan Parthasarathy
• Students: Andrew Hampton, Hemant Purohit, Lu Chen, Shreyansh Bhatt (WSU); Dave Fuhry, Yiye Ruan (OSU) 
• Funding: This collaborative research is funded by the National Science Foundation under award IIS-1111182 to Wright State University (PI: Amit Sheth) and award IIS-1111118 to Ohio State University (PI: Srinivasan Parthasarathy), 09/01/2011 - 08/31/2014.

Collaborations under the Local and Global Outreach:

• Crisis-Mapping pioneer, Dr. Patrick Meier and information credibility expert, Dr. Carlos Castillo at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI)
• Information Retrieval expert Dr. Fernando Diaz at Microsoft Research, NYC
• NCMR : National Center for Medical Readiness, Calamityville, OH

Societal Outreach via Media Coverage:

• Wright State Research Seeks Sense From Social Media to Aid in Emergencies, Wright Sate Press, Nov. 14, 2011
• Alumnus, Professor Study Social Media Usefulness During Disasters, Ohio State Press, Nov. 16, 2011
• Twitris: Taking Crisis Mapping to the Next Level, TechPresident, Jun 24, 2013
• Wright State Researchers Use Social Media and Web Information to Track Response Efforts During Natural Disasters, Wright State Press, Sept. 22, 2013
• Our research on function-centric technology to assist crisis response coordination for identifying request and offer to help has been integrated into Ushahidi's CrisisNET project, Jun 18 2014

- About capability of Twitris research platform to analyze variety of evolving events using similar underlying technologies:

• Twitris-Semantic Social Web Application, Digital Flicks, Feb 10, 2012
• Web App Analyzes Tweets in Real Time for a Record of Historic Events, Mashable, Feb. 17, 2012
• Twitris: Social Media Analysis with Semantic Web Technology, Technology Voice and New Tech Post, Apr 9, 2012

- Initiatives of Twitris team:

• Oklahoma Tornado: Analyzing 2 Million Disaster Tweets from Oklahoma Tornado, iRevolution, May 29, 2013
• North India Floods: Using crisis mapping to aid Uttarakhand, The Hindu, Jun 27, 2013
• Creating awareness for tech-assisted response: Are we missing out on tech-aided disaster management in Uttarakhand?, The Hindu, Jul 17, 2013
• Phailin cyclone crisis-map: Likewise North India floods crisis-mapping, our initiative in collaboration with Google Crisis Response team and the digital humanitarian volunteers globally from different organizations (SBTF, OpenCrisis, Info4Disasters, HumanityRoad, etc.) and universities cited by: Times Of India, DNA, Business Standard, EfyTimes, Kochi Reporter, Gadget Garrio, GeoSpatial World, Global Resilience Systems, Oct 2013

Research Tools and Ontology:

• Twitris: A 360 degree social media analytics platform to assist decision making by providing multi-faceted analyses of social data: Spatio-Temporal-Thematic, People-Content-Network, Sentiment-Emotion-Subjectivity etc.
• Crisis Computing API interface for providing 'Classification as a Service' on research of seeking-supplying intent classifiers to assist coordination: donation related message, request to help, offer to help, etc. (Also integrated with Ushahidi's CrisisNET project)
• SoCS Ontology for Crisis Coordination (SOCC): We extend the concepts of domain knowledge­-driven models, MOAC- Management Of A Crisis ontology (Limbu 2012), and UNOCHA's HXL- Humanitarian Exchange Language (Keßler et al. 2013) ontology, with required but missing concepts for organizing data during crisis response coordination for seeker and supplier behavior, and indicators of resource needs using a lexicon. For example, the 'shelter' class contains words 'emergency center,' 'tent,' and 'shelter,' along with lexical alternatives. For the present demonstration, we focus on three resource categories: food, shelter and medical needs. Thus, we endeavor to exploit a minimum, but always expandable subset that provides the maximum coverage while controlling false alarms. For creating lexicons of indicator words for concepts, we relied on various documents collected via interactions with domain experts (Flach et al. 2013), our Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training, Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium training, and publically available references (Homeland Security 2010; FEMA 2012; OCHA,Verity 2011). Using a first aid handbook (Swienton and Subbarao 2012), we created an extensive 'medical' subset of emergency indicators, where we identified words which pertained specifically to first aid or injuries and included those words along with variations in tense (i.e., breath, breathing, breathes) and common abbreviations (i.e. mouth to mouth, mouth 2 mouth, CPR). A local expert with FEMA experience augmented the model with additional indicators and provided anecdotal context. The current model with food, medical, and shelter resource indicators contain 43 concepts and 45 relationships. We created this domain model in the OWL language using the Protégé ontology editor (Protégé 2013). Each type of disaster is listed as an entity type with indicators for that disaster listed as individuals under a corresponding indicator entity. Therefore a relationship is declared stating that a particular disaster concept, say Flood, relates by property 'has_a_positive_indicator', with 'Flood_i' indicator entity, that includes all words under that heading. Each disaster has a declared negative relationship with the negative indicator list (e.g., 'erotic' under sexual words indicators) under the entity name Negative_Indicator_i. Finally resources are declared as individuals under the appropriate entity in the same way, but relationships are not explicitly stated with any disaster in order to provide flexibility. [Read more: Purohit et al., JCSCW 2014]
  • Available at: SoCS ontology
  • Developers: Hemant Purohit, Drew Hampton, Shreyansh Bhatt, Prof. Valerie Shalin. Guidance: Prof. Amit Sheth; External collaborators: Dr. Carlos Castillo (QCRI), Oshani Seveniratne (CSAIL, MIT)

Talks and tutorials:

• Ignite Talk by Hemant Purohit at ICCM-2013 (CrisisMappers conference attended by many influential folks from the humanitarian sector including decision makers, technologists and researchers) at UN Nairobi, on How to Leverage Social Media Communities for Crisis Response Coordination, Nov. 2013
• Hemant Purohit, Carlos Castillo, Patrick Meier, and Amit Sheth. Crisis Mapping, Citizen Sensing and Social Media Analytics: Leveraging Citizen Roles for Crisis Response. ICWSM-13 tutorial, July 2013 (details, slides)
• Carlos Castillo, Fernando Diaz, and Hemant Purohit. Leveraging Social Media and Web of Data for Crisis Response Coordination. SDM-2014 tutorial, Apr 2014
• Hemant Purohit and Amit Sheth. Guest lectures on Crisis Informatics and Coordination: Leveraging Citizen Roles via Social Media for Disaster Response, Course I400/I590: Informatics in Disasters and Emergency Response, Indiana University, Fall 2013

Symposium:

• AAAI Spring Symposium 2015: Structured Data for Humanitarian Technologies: Perfect fit or Overkill? #SD4HumTech15 by the SoCS team and MIT CSAIL group.

Publications:

• - Dynamics of coordination behavior during emergency situations
• H. Purohit, A. Hampton, V. Shalin, A. Sheth, J. Flach, S. Bhatt. What Kind of #Communication is Twitter? Mining #Psycholinguistic Cues for Emergency Coordination. Computers in Human Behavior (CHB) journal, Vol. 29, Issue 6, Nov. 2013, P 2438–2447.
• H. Purohit, C. Castillo, F. Diaz, A. Sheth and P. Meier. Emergency-Relief Coordination on Social Media: Automatically Matching Resource Requests and Offers. First Monday journal, Vol. 19, Issue 1, Jan 2014. 
• H. Purohit, A. Hampton, S. Bhatt, V. Shalin, A. Sheth, J. Flach. Identifying Seekers and Suppliers in Social Media Communities to Support Crisis Coordination. Journal of CSCW, 2014.
• H. Purohit, S. Bhatt, A. Hampton, V. Shalin, A. Sheth, J. Flach. With Whom to Coordinate, Why and How in Ad-hoc Social Media Communities during Crisis Response. ISCRAM, 2014.
• S. Bhatt, H. Purohit, A. Hampton, V. Shalin, A. Sheth, J. Flach.Assisting Coordination during Crisis: A Domain Ontology based Approach to Infer Resource Needs from Tweets. ACM WebSci, 2014.
• H. Purohit. Crisis Response Coordination in Online Communities. Doctoral Consortium at NSF SOCS Symposium, 2013.
• H. Purohit, A. Hampton, V. Shalin, A. Sheth, J. Flach. Framework to Analyze Coordination in Crisis Response. Collaboration and Crisis Informatics, Workshop in conjunction with CSCW-2012.
• H. Purohit, A. Hampton, V. Shalin, A. Sheth, J. Flach. What kind of #communication is Twitter? A psycholinguistic perspective on communication in Twitter for the purpose of emergency coordination. NSF SoCS Symposium, 2012.
• J.M. Flach, D. Steele-Johnson, V.L. Shalin and G.C. Hamilton. Coordination and control in emergency response. To appear in: Badiru & Racz (eds.) Handbook of Emergency Response: A Human Factors and Systems Engineering Approach. Taylor & Francis, Aug. 2013.
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• - Understanding community engagement and sustainability on Twitter
• H. Purohit, Y. Ruan, D. Fuhry, S. Parthasarathy, A. Sheth. On Understanding Divergence of Online Social Group Discussion. ICWSM 2014.
• Y. Ruan, H. Purohit, D. Fuhry, S. Parthasarthy, A. Sheth. Prediction of Topic Volume on Twitter. 4th Int'l ACM Conference on Web Science (WebSci), 2012.
• Y. Ruan. On the Interplay of Social Network Connection, User and Content. Doctoral Consortium at NSF SoCS Symposium, 2012.
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• - Generic approaches for influence analysis in evolving communities on social media
• H. Purohit, J. Ajmera, S. Joshi, A. Verma, A. Sheth. Finding Influential authors in Brand-page Communities. In Proceedings of the 6th Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2012.
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• - Extracting diverse sentiment expression with target dependent polarity and emotion identification
• L. Chen, W. Wang and A. Sheth. Are Twitter Users Equal in Predicting Elections? A Study of User Groups in Predicting 2012 U.S. Republican Presidential Primaries . Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo'12). December 5-8, 2012, Lausanne, Switzerland.
• L. Chen, W. Wang, M. Nagarajan, S. Wang and A. Sheth. Extracting Diverse Sentiment Expressions with Target-dependent Polarity from Twitter. In Proceedings of the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2012.
• L. Chen. Extracting Diverse Sentiment Expressions With Target-dependent Polarity from Twitter. Doctoral Symposium at NSF SoCS Symposium, 2012.
• Wenbo Wang, Lu Chen, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan and Amit P. Sheth. Harnessing Twitter ‘Big Data’ for Automatic Emotion Identification . In Proceedings of International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom), 2012.
• Wenbo Wang, Lu Chen, Ming Tan, Shaojun Wang, Amit P. Sheth. Discovering Fine-grained Sentiment in Suicide Notes. Biomedical Informatics Insights, vol. 5 (Suppl. 1) pp. 137-145, 2012
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• - Behavior analysis of online users
• Wenbo Wang, Lu Chen, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan and Amit P. Sheth. Cursing in English on Twitter . In ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW'14), 2014.
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• - User Personalization and Search
• Wenbo Wang, Lei Duan, Anirudh Koul, Amit P. Sheth. YouRank: Let User Engagement Rank Microblog Search Results. In the Eighth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM'14) 2014
• Kapanipathi, P., Jain, P., Venkataramani, C., & Sheth, A. (2014). User Interests Identification on Twitter Using a Hierarchical Knowledge Base. In The Semantic Web: Trends and Challenges (pp. 99-113). Springer International Publishing. 2014
• Pavan Kapanipathi, Prateek Jain, Chitra Venkataramani, and Amit Sheth. 2014. Hierarchical interest graph from tweets. In Proceedings of the companion publication of the 23rd international conference on World wide web companion (WWW Companion '14). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, 311-312. DOI=10.1145/2567948.2577353 dx.doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2577353
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• - Community dynamics in the social networks
• D. Fuhry, Y. Ruan and S. Parthasarathy. Local/Global Term Analysis for Discovering Community Differences in Social Networks. 4th Int'l ACM Conference on Web Science (WebSci), 2012.
• D. Fuhry. Summarization, Search, and Community Analysis in Social Networks. Doctoral Symposium at NSF SoCS Symposium, 2012.
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• - Multi-faceted social media analytics platform: Spatio-Temporal-Thematic, People-Content-Network and Sentiment-Emotion-Subjectivity analyses
• H. Purohit and A. Sheth. Twitris v3: From Citizen Sensing to Analysis, Coordination and Action. In Proceedings of the 7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2013, Demo track.
• A. Sheth, A. Jadhav, P. Kapanipathi, C. Lu, H. Purohit, G. A. Smith, W. Wang. Twitris- a System for Collective Social Intelligence. Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining (ESNAM), 2014.
• K. Thirunarayan and A. Sheth. Semantics-empowered Approaches to Big Data Processing for Physical-Cyber-Social Applications. In: Proceedings of AAAI 2013 Fall Symposium on Semantics for Big Data, Arlington, Virginia, November 15-17, 2013.
• A. Smith, A. Sheth, A. Jadhav, H. Purohit, L. Chen, M. Cooney, P. Kapanipathi, P. Anantharam, P. Koneru and W. Wang. Twitris+: Social Media Analytics Platform for Effective Coordination. NSF SoCS Symposium, 2012.
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• - Dynamics of content driven networks
• S. Parthasarathy. A Scalable Framework for Content+Network Analytics. NSF SoCS Symposium, 2012.
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• -  Community and Role Dection from Networks
• Y. Ruan, S. Parthasarathy. Simultaneous Detection of Communities and Roles from Large Networks. ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN) 2014.
• Y. Shih, S. Kim, Y. Ruan, J. Cheng, A. Gattani, T. Shi, S. Parthasarathy. Component Detection in Directed Networks. ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2014.
• Y. Ruan, D. Fuhry, S. Parthasarathy. Efficient community detection in large networks using content and links. ACM WWW International Conference on World Wide Web, 2013.
• V. Satuluri, S. Parthasarathy, Y. Ruan. Local Graph Sparsification for Scalable Clustering. ACM SIGMOD Int’l Conference on Management of Data, 2011. (Related work done for foundation to build for SoCS work)
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• - High Dimensional Data analytics
• Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan and Amit Sheth. Semantics-empowered Big Data Processing with Applications, In: AI Magazine, 2014, 12 pages.
• Amit Sheth, Pramod Anantharam, and Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan. Applications of Multimodal Physical (IoT), Cyber and Social Data for Reliable and Actionable Insights. 2nd IEEE C-IOT workshop. 2014. (To appear)
• D. Fuhry, Y. Zhang, V. Satuluri, A. Nandi, and S. Parathasarathy. PLASMA-HD: Probing the LAttice Structure and MAkeup of High-dimensional Data. (demo) VLDB 2013.
• X. Yang, A. Ghoting, Y. Ruan, S. Parthasarathy. A Framework for Summarizing and Analyzing Twitter Feeds. ACM SIGKDD Int’l Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2012.

Check out the summary of our research progress and proposed sensemaking framework here

Figure 2. Some of the capabilities of Twitris for emergency management and coordination: (1) shows popular topics – also called social signals (weighted n-grams) related to the chosen event for today and any day of the past since the event was tracked; (2) shows key topics of discussions by locations/regions – states, country: (2.a) to select location of interest—each pin shows a collection of social signals emanating from a location, (2.b) shows popular topic from a location; (3) shows the topical user interaction networks (3.b), and influencers (3.a) with demographics, e.g., with knowledge of user profession (3.c); (4) selects date of analysis, (5) displays tweets (5.a), recent news (5.b), and Wikipedia pages (5.c) related to selected events and social signals; (6) shows event specific multimedia (images (6.a) and videos (6.b)). A number of major natural disasters (tornados, floods, hurricanes/cyclones, earthquakes) were monitored; examples can be found online at twitris.knoesis.org. A number of additional capabilities related to sentiment, emotion, subjectivity/intent are not shown in this picture but can be seen knoesis.org/library/resource.php?id=1918.

Figure 3. Google Crisis Map for cyclone Phalin in Oct 2013, which used crowdsourced data from global digital humanitarian volunteers (aka crisismappers) spearheaded by the SoCS researchers in Twitris team at Kno.e.sis. We thank our collaborators at the Google Crisis Response team and volunteers globally from different organizations (SBTF, OpenCrisis, Info4Disasters, Humanity Road, etc.) and universities, for the tireless effort in this initiative.

We took a similar initiative of crisis mapping during Uttarakhand flash floods in Jun 2013, in collaboration with the Google Crisis Response team and volunteers from universities and prestigious organizations globally (SBTF, Info4, OpenCrisis, HOT, CrisisMappersUK), including a surge support from the Humanity Road. The Hindu newspaper cited this effort: Using crisis mapping to aid Uttarakhand, and for creating awareness about tech-assisted response: Are we missing out on tech-aided disaster management in Uttarakhand?, Jun 2013.

Foundation of SOCS:

• Check our WWW-2011 tutorial: Citizen Sensor Data Mining, Social Media Analytics and Development Centric Web Applications
• Semantics driven analysis of Social Media

Checkout summaries for related research and projects here
Student Contact: Hemant Purohit

A quick summary of our analysis frameworks and systems: (see in full page)