Crisis Sub-Events on Social Media: A Case Study of Wildfires

Social media has been extensively used for crisis management. Recent work examines possible sub-events as a major crisis unfolds. In this project, we first propose a framework to identify sub-events from tweets. Then, leveraging 4 California wildfires in 2018-2019 as a case study, we investigate how sub-events cascade based on existing hypotheses drawn from the disaster management literature, and find that most hypotheses are supported on social media, e.g., fire induces smoke, which causes air pollution, which later harms health and eventually affects the healthcare system. In addition, we discuss other unexpected sub-events that emerge from social media.

Speaker bio: Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes is Chief Scientist and SVP of AI at Dataminr. Alex has 15+ years of intl. experience in research and product impact at scale. He has published 100+ technical papers in top-tier conferences and journals in diverse topics in AI and has been featured widely in the press (MIT Tech review, CNBC, Vice, TechCrunch, Yahoo! Finance, etc.). He has given 80+ invited talks (AI for Good Global Summit (UN, Geneva), the Future of Technology Summit, O’Reilly (AI, Strata, Velocity), Deep Learning Summit, etc.). Alex is also an Endeavor Network mentor (which leads the high-impact entrepreneurship movement around the world), and was an early voice in Human-Centered AI (Computing). He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia U.