Related papers: Information Retrieval and Classification of Real-T…
With increasing urbanization, in recent years there has been a growing interest and need in monitoring and analyzing urban flood events. Social media, as a new data source, can provide real-time information for flood monitoring. The social…
The rapid proliferation of deep-learning-based detection and association methods has greatly expanded automatically generated earthquake catalogs, but has also introduced false detections, mis-associated arrivals, and poorly constrained…
Natural disasters ravage the world's cities, valleys, and shores on a regular basis. Deploying precise and efficient computational mechanisms for assessing infrastructure damage is essential to channel resources and minimize the loss of…
During a disaster event, images shared on social media helps crisis managers gain situational awareness and assess incurred damages, among other response tasks. Recent advances in computer vision and deep neural networks have enabled the…
Lack of global data inventories obstructs scientific modeling of and response to landslide hazards which are oftentimes deadly and costly. To remedy this limitation, new approaches suggest solutions based on citizen science that requires…
In post-event reconnaissance missions, engineers and researchers collect perishable information about damaged buildings in the affected geographical region to learn from the consequences of the event. A typical post-event reconnaissance…
Emergency navigation algorithms direct evacuees to exits when disastrous events such as fire take place. Due to the spread of hazards, latency in information updating and unstable flows of civilians, emergency evacuation is absolutely a…
We present a congestion-aware routing solution for indoor evacuation, which produces real-time individual-customized evacuation routes among multiple destinations while keeping tracks of all evacuees' locations. A population density map,…
Major disasters such as extreme weather events can magnify and exacerbate pre-existing social disparities, with disadvantaged populations bearing disproportionate costs. Despite the implications for equity and emergency planning, we lack a…
During a disaster scenario, situational awareness information, such as location, physical status and images of the surrounding area, is essential for minimizing loss of life, injury, and property damage. Today's handhelds make it easy for…
As Earth's climate changes, it is impacting disasters and extreme weather events across the planet. Record-breaking heat waves, drenching rainfalls, extreme wildfires, and widespread flooding during hurricanes are all becoming more frequent…
This paper complements the large body of social sensing literature by developing means for augmenting sensing data with inference results that "fill-in" missing pieces. It specifically explores the synergy between (i) inference techniques…
Disaster prediction is one of the most critical tasks towards disaster surveillance and preparedness. Existing technologies employ different machine learning approaches to predict incoming disasters from historical environmental data.…
Water events are the most frequent and costliest climate disasters around the world. In the U.S., an estimated 127 million people who live in coastal areas are at risk of substantial home damage from hurricanes or flooding. In flood…
Fast and accurate prediction of hurricane evolution from genesis onwards is needed to reduce loss of life and enhance community resilience. In this work, a novel model development methodology for predicting storm trajectory is proposed…
In most of today's emergency scenarios information plays a crucial role. Therefore, information has to be constantly collected and shared among all rescue team members and this requires new innovative technologies. In this paper a…
The time at which a message is communicated is a vital piece of metadata in many real-world natural language processing tasks such as Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT). TDT systems aim to cluster a corpus of news articles by event, and in…
The extensive use of social media platforms, especially during disasters, creates unique opportunities for humanitarian organizations to gain situational awareness and launch relief operations accordingly. In addition to the textual…
With increased frequency and intensity due to climate change, wildfires have become a growing global concern. This creates severe challenges for fire and emergency services as well as communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). To…
Decision-makers in the humanitarian sector rely on timely and exact information during crisis events. Knowing how many civilians were injured during an earthquake is vital to allocate aids properly. Information about such victim counts is…