Social Sensing for Urban Crisis Management: The Case of Singapore Haze

Sensing social media for trends and events has become possible as increasing number of users rely on social media to share information. In the event of a major disaster or social event, one can therefore study the event quickly by gathering and analyzing social media data. One can also design appropriate responses such as allocating resources to the affected areas, sharing event related information, and managing public anxiety. Past research on social event studies using social media often focused on one type of data analysis (e.g., hashtag clusters, diffusion of events, influential users, etc.) on a single social media data source. This paper adopts a comprehensive social event analysis framework covering content, emotion, activity, and network. We propose a set of measures for each dimension accordingly. The usefulness of these analyses are demonstrated through a haze event that severely affected Singapore and its neighbors in June 2013. The analysis, conducted on both Twitter and Foursquare data, shows that much user attention was given to the haze event. The event also saw substantial emotional and behavioral impact on the social media users. These additional insights will help both public and private sectors to prepare themselves for future haze related events.