Rescuers Mine Social Media in Typhoon Response

Updated Nov. 10, 2013 10:45 a.m. ETIn disasters like the typhoon that slammed into the Philippines, sifting through a barrage of confusing and conflicting on-the-ground reports is one of the first problems facing rescue teams. Social-media sites such as Twitter TWTR -7.24% Twitter Inc. U.S.: NYSE $41.65 -3.25 -7.24% Nov. 8, 2013 4:01 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 27.71M AFTER HOURS $41.72 +0.07 +0.17% Nov. 8, 2013 7:59 pm Volume (Delayed 15m): 210,694 P/E Ratio N/A Market Cap $24.93 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $267,231 11/09/13 Twitter Gives Results a Shine 11/08/13 Podcast: From Tapering to Twit… 11/08/13 Crystal Ball: Test Your Predic… More quote details and news » TWTR in Your Value Your Change Short position and Facebook FB -0.06% Facebook Inc. Cl A U.S.: Nasdaq $47.53 -0.03 -0.06% Nov. 8, 2013 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 70.10M AFTER HOURS $47.37 -0.16 -0.34% Nov. 8, 2013 7:59 pm Volume (Delayed 15m): 632,964 P/E Ratio 110.53 Market Cap $113.99 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $1,487,770 11/08/13 Crystal Ball: Test Your Predic… 11/08/13 Twitter IPO: Comparing it to I… 11/08/13 Twitter Slumps on Day Two: Val… More quote details and news » FB in Your Value Your Change Short position can make matters worse. All too often, users recycle what others have posted or retweeted without adding any fresh information.
Sorting through all the noise is too much for individual agencies to handle on their own.
So Swiss-born Patrick Meier is gearing up to attack the problem with a new approach called social mapping: Using a combination of volunteers and algorithms to filter the chaos and to provide rescue teams with a detailed, data-driven map of what they should be doing, and where.

Mr. Meier’s volunteer network’s data became the basis for the UN’s first-ever disaster map created from information gleaned from social media.

Raw video, much of it posted on social media, shows the huge waves, dangerous winds and widespread destruction in the central Philippines caused by Supertyphoon Haiyan. Officials expect the death toll to be substantial. Photo: Instagram/Francis Rufo

“This is artificial intelligence disaster response,” said Mr. Meier, 35 years old, in describing the system, which is now helping the United Nations’ disaster-response agency respond to the unfolding calamity in the Philippines.
The idea is to use a software platform called MicroMappers to identify useful information through set keywords. Volunteers refine the process further by noting, or tagging, to classify tweets according to their content, whether they are appeals for help, reports of property damage or shortages of medical supplies.
In future deployments, the platform will be developed further to “learn” what kind of material to seek out from the web.
The Philippines’ latest tragedy will likely be a stiff test for the software. Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda, is the most powerful storm to make landfall anywhere in the world, weather experts say. It ripped up power lines, shut down cellular relay stations, and left a trail of destruction across the worst-affected areas. Reports emerging Sunday suggested that thousands of people might have been killed. The Associated Press reported regional police chief Elmer Soria as saying that Gov. Dominic Petilla had told him that there could have been about 10,000 deaths in Leyte province, which appeared to bear the brunt of the storm’s impact.
As cellphone networks and power supplies are gradually restored, more news about the gravity of the situation will emerge, Philippine government officials have said.
This provides a chance for Mr. Meier, who is director of social innovation at the Qatar Foundation’s Computing Research Institute in Doha, to put the MicroMappers platform and his expanding team of volunteers to the test.
Mr. Meier has tapped volunteers to track disasters before. His efforts helped created digital maps that aided rescuers in getting quickly to trouble spots during the Haiti earthquake in 2010.
When a devastating typhoon hit the Philippines in 2012, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs used Mr. Meier’s task force to analyze the hive of information coming from Twitter and create a map of useful data, literally labeling what needed to be done and where, such as providing clean water, resolving power-supply issues or sourcing fresh medical supplies. After analyzing 20,000 tweets in 10 hours, Mr. Meier’s volunteer network’s data became the basis for the UN’s first-ever disaster map created from information gleaned from social media.
“Clearly our communications networks with our colleagues out in the field come under strain, and this helps fill in the gaps,” says Elizabeth Marasco at the information-management office of the United Nations’ disaster-response office in the Philippines. “This is very new to us and very innovative. There is a lot there to help us.”
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To be sure, this social-media response to disasters appears to work better in some countries rather than others.
The first trial of the MicroMappers software was during an earthquake that struck the Baluchistan region of Pakistan in September, killing more than 800 people. Mr. Meier said MicroMappers didn’t receive much in the way of useful information about that via Twitter, largely because the uptake of the Internet and social media in that dusty, remote region is very small.
The Philippines, though, offers a very different environment. Some 36% of its 100 million people are regularly using the Internet, many of them through mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets—more than many of their peers in nearby countries such as Thailand and Indonesia. What’s more, many people are avid users of social-media sites, especially Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
“There’s a very large, sophisticated social-media footprint there,” Mr. Meier says, adding that the Philippines is an ideal place for fine-tuning the way in which social media can help direct disaster-response plans in other parts of the world.
And this time, he hopes that the torrent of tweets, Facebook postings and Instagram videos expected to emerge from the affected areas in the Philippines could help build an even more detailed picture of the calamity, and provide valuable fresh clues for rescue teams.
One important change is that the information sought in tweets and other social-media traffic is filtered according to a checklist provided by the United Nations. These include requests for helps and reports of infrastructure damage.
Volunteers can also work on the go, using mobile apps. When three people have separately cleared a tweet, it is then ready for forwarding as “clean” information to create a disaster map.
“This is a work in progress. There’s lots of room for improvement,” Mr. Meier says. “But for us, doing is learning, and our partners appreciate that.”
Write to James Hookway at james.hookway@wsj.com

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