How AI, Twitter and digital volunteers are transforming humanitarian disaster response

Wired UK, 30 September 2013.

Katie Collins covers part of our work in Social Computing and Social Innovation at QCRI:

On 24 September a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck south-west Pakistan, killing at least 300 people. The following day Patrick Meier at the Qatar Computer Research Institute (QCRI) received a call from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) asking him to help deal with the digital fallout -- the thousands of tweets, photos and videos that were being posted on the web containing potentially valuable information about the disaster.

[...] AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response) was the second project tested for the first time during the Pakistan floods, and is due to be launched officially at the CrisisMappers conference in Nairobi in November. It's an open-source tool relying on both human and machine computing, allowing human users to train algorithms to automatically classify tweets and determine whether or not they are relevant to a particular disaster.

In Pakistan, SBTF volunteers tagged 1,000 tweets, out of which 130 were used to create a classifier and train an algorithm that could be used to recognise relevant tweets with up to 80 percent accuracy ...

Full article in Wired UK.