Emergency Management with Social Networks

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Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have become ubiquitous as tools for rapid dissemination of all types of information for emergencies. In particular, the actors (participants and responders) in critical situations such as fire, terrorist attacks, earthquakes and hurricanes will try to acquire information on the occurrence of an emergency and about the state of the emergency as quickly and as accurately as possible in order to be able to implement emergency measures. In the past only scattered mostly local information was available through word of mouth and telephones. Today wireless communications, the Internet and in particular, social networks, are able to gather and disseminate orders of magnitude more information about the state of an emergency resulting in more effective emergency management.***This research proposal will explore the gathering of information on emergencies, transmitting information about emergencies and managing emergencies using social networks. We will investigate and improve on current models for emergency detection using social network tools. We will work with MANET technology for maintaining wireless network connectivity during a critical situation. Given that connectivity is established and maintained we will gather and process social media information to assess its veracity with respect to the critical situation. Finally, the social network data will be used to guide the behaviour of actors in the emergency situation.******The research proposal has three themes:***Theme 1: Information gathering using social networks. We will crawl social network sites and filter the resulting data for indications of emergencies. Keyword extraction and veracity assessment will be applied to filter out false information.***Theme 2: Information transmission for social networks. We will improve the methodology for using MANET technology for disaster management employing social networks when the communications infrastructure has been damaged. ***Theme 3: Emergency management using social networks. Simulating the emergency evacuation of structures will be implemented and tested using social network based crowd behaviour algorithms.******The proposal will result in new ways of handling emergency situations. Challenges that are addressed in this proposal include how to use social networks to gather, inform and transmit emergency information so that emergencies are mitigated.******This proposal in applying social networks to emergency management is established as a continuation of my past research record over 48 years which includes elevation to IEEE Fellow and an excellent research record as shown by the Hirsch h-index of 29 and a Researchgate score 40.28. I will also emphasize the recent appearance of the prestigious "Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining published by Springer Verlag and as a main organizer of ASONAM(The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining.**************