Run amok: Group crowd participation in identifying the bomb and bomber from the Boston marathon bombing

Comparing Social Media and Traditional Surveys around the Boston Marathon Bombing

Sociological surveys have been a key instrument in understanding social phenomena, but do the introduction and popularity of social media threaten to usurp the survey’s place? The significant amount of data one can capture from social media sites like Twitter make such sources appealing. Limited work has tried to triangulate these sources pragmatically for research. This paper documents experie...

Evaluating Public Response to the Boston Marathon Bombing and Other Acts of Terrorism through Twitter

What it Takes to Get Passed On: Message Content, Style, and Structure as Predictors of Retransmission in the Boston Marathon Bombing Response

Message retransmission is a central aspect of information diffusion. In a disaster context, the passing on of official warning messages by members of the public also serves as a behavioral indicator of message salience, suggesting that particular messages are (or are not) perceived by the public to be both noteworthy and valuable enough to share with others. This study provides the first examin...

Discrete relative states to learn and recognize goals-based behaviors of groups

In a crisis management context, situation awareness is challenging due to the complexity of the environment and the limited resources available to the security forces. The different emerging threats are difficult to identify and the behavior of the crowd (separated in groups) is difficult to interpret and manage. In order to solve this problem, the authors propose a method to detect threat and ...

Situational Awareness from Social Media

This paper describes VIStology’s HADRian system for semantically integrating disparate information sources into a common operational picture (COP) for humanitarian assistance/disaster relief (HADR) operations. Here the system is applied to the task of determining where unexploded or additional bombs were being reported via Twitter in the hours immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing in Ap...