AirCalypse: Revealing Fine-Grained Air Quality from Social Media

Air Pollution has been a growing menace in developing countries like India, China due to rapid and often unplanned urbanization. To take necessary measures, an effective ambient air monitoring system needs to be present that can provide a city-wide fine-grained air quality map. The existing ambient air quality static monitoring stations incur high installation & maintenance costs and suffer from sparse coverage. On the other hand, in the recent years, there has been active participation of social media users in creating awareness as well as feeding pollution-related information via several micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Sina-Weibo, etc. The objective of this work is to exploit the presence of such pollution related micro-blogs, combine and associate them with pollution data sensed by static monitoring stations to obtain an authentic air quality map with higher coverage. Here, we reveal some interesting initial exploratory results on inferring air quality using Twitter data. The underlying challenges to model such associations have also been highlighted.