A new Purdue-created online platform could help first responders better monitor areas where hurricanes make landfall, thus help people caught in weather-related disasters.

 

The Social Media Analytics and Reporting Toolkit allows end users to map, interactively explore and navigate large volumes of data, topics, and anomalies that occur in real-time via social media networks such as Flickr, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.

 

The Purdue Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments (VACCINE) Center has developed a new approach to let end users build and customize message/keyword filters interactively and visually. The created filter methods can be arranged and adapted continually for monitoring and analyzing data, which is of particular importance when making decisions in a time sensitive manner.

 

This technology provides end users with scalable and interactive social media analysis and visualization through topic extraction, a combination of filters, cluster examination, and stream categorization. Features of the system include real-time monitoring of social media channels, extraction of trending and abnormal topics, density-based spatial clustering at multiple spatial scales, message classification based on intention verbs, and task-tailored interactive message categorization.

 

These components are tightly integrated into a highly interactive visual analysis workbench that allows end users to observe, supervise, and configure the methods in each analysis process. The system also incorporates novel visual analytic techniques to extract and visualize crowd movement patterns and trajectories using social media data at various scales of analysis to allow users to detect anomalies and outlier patterns. The system can also send automatically email alerts based on user-defined keywords and thresholds.