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On the need of opening up crowdsourced emergency management systems

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Abstract

Nowadays, social media analysis systems are feeding on user contributed data, either for beneficial purposes, such as emergency management, or for user profiling and mass surveillance. Here, we carry out a discussion about the power and pitfalls of public accessibility to social media-based systems, with specific regards to the emergency management application EARS (Earthquake Alert and Report System). We investigate whether opening such systems to the population at large would further strengthen the link between communities of volunteer citizens, intelligent systems, and decision makers, thus going in the direction of developing more sustainable and resilient societies. Our analysis highlights fundamental challenges and provides interesting insights into a number of research directions with the aim of developing human-centered social media-based systems.

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Notes

  1. http://www.iit.cnr.it/en.

  2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/22/mass-surveillance-needed-isis-attack-mike-rogers.

  3. Examples of organizations that currently employ digital volunteers and that define their role in modern emergency management are the Humanitarian Response (https://www.humanitarianresponse.info/en/applications/tools/category/digital-volunteers.) and the International Red Cross (http://redcrosschat.org/disaster-digital-volunteer-training/#sthash.yVdEzS21.dpbs).

  4. https://en.wikipedia.org.

  5. http://harassmap.org/en/.

  6. http://www.humanitariantracker.org/.

  7. https://www.ushahidi.com/.

  8. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alluvione_di_Genova_del_9_e_10_ottobre_2014. (in Italian)

  9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_flood_of_the_Arno_River.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Marco Avvenuti & Fabio Del Vigna

  2. National Research Council (CNR), Institute of Informatics and Telematics (IIT), via G. Moruzzi 1, 56124, Pisa, Italy

    Stefano Cresci, Fabio Del Vigna & Maurizio Tesconi

Authors
  1. Marco Avvenuti
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  2. Stefano Cresci
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  3. Fabio Del Vigna
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  4. Maurizio Tesconi
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Stefano Cresci or Fabio Del Vigna.

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Avvenuti, M., Cresci, S., Vigna, F.D. et al. On the need of opening up crowdsourced emergency management systems. AI & Soc 33, 55–60 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0709-4

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