Harnessing the Crowdsourcing Power of Social Media for Disaster ...

enlarges the dimension of the searchspace. 3 Large-scale data-managementtechnology will be necessary to maintaina system’s stability.Safety is another problem thatmust be considered in a disaster reliefmanagement plan, especially in thedesign of a crowdsourcing system.While making data publically available,such systems must protect theNGOs’ privacy and ensure the safetyof their workers.Crowdsourcing integrated with crisismaps has been a powerful tool inhumanitarian assistance and disasterrelief. Future crowdsourcing applicationsmust provide capabilities to bettermanage unstructured messagesand enhance streaming data. Enhancementswill also include methodsof fusing information with data fromother sources, such as geological dataabout fault lines and reports of variousearthquake aftershocks. Researchersare just beginning to consider trustmanagement systems to help evaluatemessages with respect to the hugetroves of messages being traded incyberspace and via cell phones.Furthermore, metrics that gauge thesuccess of crowdsourcing and coordinationsystems for disaster relief willbe designed and leveraged for systemevaluation and improvement. Creatingan automatic recommendation systemthat helps improve resource distributioncoordination and transportationroutesuggestions is another researchdirection that can utilize real-timedata collection and relief history.There is no doubt that new coordinationplatform and crowdsourcingapplications such as crowdsourcedtranslation, filtering, and categorizationwill continue to become availableand will significantly contributeto future disaster relief efforts. Weare confident that great numbersof lives will be saved as governmentsand NGOs find better ways toemploy the integration of socialmedia, crowdsourcing, and collaborativetools into disaster relief systems.References1. J. Morgan, “Twitter and FacebookUsers Respond to Haiti Crisis,” BBCNews, 15 Jan. 2010; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8460791.stm.2. Digital Blogger, “Japan Tsunamiand Earthquake Use of Twitter,Facebook, Skype and Other SocialNetworks,” 12 Mar. 2011; http://bubblecube.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/japan-tsunami-earthquake.3. A. Bedrouni et al., Distributed IntelligentSystems: A Coordination Perspective,Springer, 2009.4. R. Goolsby, “Social Media as CrisisPlatform: The Future of CommunityMaps/Crisis Maps,” ACM Trans. IntelligentSystems Technology, vol. 1, no.1, 2010, article no. 7.5. J. Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,”Wired, vol. 14, no. 6, 2006, pp. 1–4.6. J. Surowiecki, “The Wisdom ofCrowds,” Am. J. Physics, vol. 75, no. 2,2007, p. 190.7. P. Meier and K. Brodock, “CrisisMapping Kenya’s Election Violence,”iRevolution blog, 23 Oct. 2008; http://irevolution.net/2008/10/23/mappingkenyas-election-violence.8. J. Heinzelman and C. Waters,Crowdsourcing Crisis Information inDisaster-Affected Haiti, US Inst. ofPeace, 2010.9. CrowdFlower, “Mission 4636,” 2010;www.mission4636.org.10. H. Gao et al., “Promoting Coordinationfor Disaster Relief: FromCrowdsourcing to Coordination,”Proc. Int’l Conf. Social Computing,Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, andPrediction, Springer-Verlag, 2011,pp. 197–204.11. F.-Y. Wang et al., “Social Computing:From Social Informatics to Social Intelligence,”IEEE Intelligent Systems,vol. 22, no. 2, 2007, pp. 79–83.Our experts.Your future.Huiji Gao is a PhD student in the DataMining and Machine Learning (DMML)lab at Arizona State University. Contact himat Huiji.Gao@asu.edu.Geoffrey Barbier is a doctoral candidatein computer science and a student inthe Data Mining and Machine Learning(DMML) lab at Arizona State University.Contact him at gbarbier@asu.edu.www.computer.org/bycRebecca Goolsby is an anthropologist forthe US Office of Naval Research. Contacther at rebecca.goolsby@navy.mil.14 www.computer.org/intelligent Ieee INTELLIGenT SYSTemS