MicroFilters: Harnessing twitter for disaster management

As social media grows more rapidly each day, new ways to harness worldwide connectivity are being continually discovered. The role of social media in disaster management emerged in 2012; social media data can yield rescue and aid opportunities for humanitarians. Immediately after a natural disaster, an overwhelming amount of this data floods social workers. Unfortunately, the majority of this data carries no value to disaster responders, who are only interested in location and severity of damage. MicroFilters is a system designed to take advantage of image data by scraping tweets and the links therein for images, then using machine learning to classify them. This classification will eliminate images that do not show direct damage and therefore are not useful to rescue efforts. This paper outlines the development of the MicroFilters system from start to finish, including key technical problems involved such as data sparseness, feature engineering, and classification. The experimental evaluation validates the proposal and shows the efficiency of our techniques (average 88% recall and 70% precision). We also discuss opportunities for future development of the MicroFilters system.