RAPID: Earthquake Damage Assessment from Social Media

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In the minutes and hours following the recent earthquakes in New Zealand and in Japan, and storm in Haiti, thousands of locals posted pictures to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. These pictures when coupled with extremely granular spatio-temporal information (e.g., timestamps and GPS-style geocodes) provide a minute-by-minute and region-by-region pictorial account of the emergency as it unfolded. The goal of this project is to assess, characterize, and model the quality of these images posted to social media in the minutes and hours post-emergency for guiding policy-based stakeholders and assets. Carefully framed images can convey a wealth of structural information to recovery experts: revealing damage levels, guiding resource allocation, and directing other policy-based assets. First, a sample of several thousand social media images from New Zealand will be assessed by domain experts and specifically structural earthquake engineers. Second, with RAPID funding, this project will link images posted during the emergency to actual damage assessments made in Christchurch for validating the quality of images. First, a sample of several thousand social media images from New Zealand will be assessed by domain experts and specifically structural earthquake engineers. The results of this project will have broad impacts, particularly in the development and deployment of a new rapid assessment tool for earthquake damage assessment based on social media. An additional broader impact is the ancillary development of training modules for increasing the effectiveness and image quality of future socially-generated image capture, which would greatly improve social computing for disasters. The methods and data generated by this project will be archived and made available for future studies.