“Social media (SM) statistics during recent disasters (e.g., the 20 million tweets relating to «Sandy» storm and the sharing of related photos in Instagram at a rate of 10/sec) provide tangible evidence that security forces and civil protection agencies could greatly benefit from the effective blending of SM information into their processes. However, despite the widespread use of SM in various domains (e.g., marketing/branding/finance, there is still no easy, structured and effective way to leverage several SM in security/emergency management applications.
SUPER is a joint effort of social media experts (incl. social network providers) and security experts (incl. security and civil protection agencies), towards introducing a holistic, integrated and privacy-friendly approach to the use of social media in emergencies and security incidents. The approach will operate at multiple time-scales (before/during/after events), while serving both strategic and tactical level operations. It will be characterized by: a. Intelligent information gathering from SM based on novel algorithms (sentiment analysis, topic tracking, real-time event detection), b. Quantitative assessment of the credibility of SM information towards alleviating manipulation, c. Integrated search over multiple SM towards deriving non-obvious information, d. Gathering/analysis of the citizens’ and the forces’ opinions as part of policy modelling processes, e. Use of SM as an effective way for conveying information to stakeholders, f. Modular integration of the above functionalities within existing processes for strategic planning, management of operations, generation of operational picture and management of policies for emergencies, g. Compliance with privacy laws/regulations. SUPER will be validated in two complementary scenarios spanning civil protection activities (earthquakes) and police activities (unrest).”