Venue: Salle St Clair 1 
Session 1
09:00 - 09:30 - Opening
09.30 - 10.30 - Keynote Address by Prasenjit Mitra: Utility of Social Media Information in Response to Natural Disasters
[abstract][slides]
10:30 - 11:00 - Tea/Coffee Break
Session 2
11:00 - 11:20 - [Accepted Paper] Modeling evacuation behavior of NYC Twitter users during Hurricane Sandy.
Dheeraj Kumar and Satish Ukkusuri [pdf]
11:20 - 11:40 - [Accepted paper] Flood relevance estimation from visual and textual content in social media streams.
Anastasia Moumtzidou, Stelios Andreadis, Ilias Gialampoukidis, Anastasios Karakostas, Stefanos Vrochidis and Yiannis Kompatsiaris [pdf]
11:40 - 12:00 - [Accepted paper] Class Specific TF-IDF Boosting for Short-text Classification.
Samujjwal Ghosh and Maunendra Sankar Desarkar [pdf]
12:00 - 12:20 - Discussion: Introducing the questions for panel discussion
12:20 - 13:30 - Lunch break
Session 3
13:30 - 14:30 - Keynote Address by Amit Sheth: Transforming Social Big Data into Timely Decisions and Actions for Crisis Mitigation and Coordination [abstract][slides]
14:30 - 14:50 - [Accepted paper] Gold Standard Creation for Microblog Retrieval: Challenges of Completeness in IRMiDis 2017.
Ribhav Soni and Sukomal Pal [pdf]
14:50 - 15:10 - [Accepted paper] SAVITR: A System for Real-time Location Extraction from Microblogs during Emergencies.
Ritam Dutt, Kaustubh Hiware, Avijit Ghosh and Rameshwar Bhaskaran [pdf]
15:10 - 15:40 - Tea/Coffee Break
Session 4
15:40 - 16:40 - Panel discussion: Answers to the questions
16:40 - 17:00 - Open discussion and closing
The ever-increasing amounts of user-generated contents on online social media (OSM) platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. have become important sources of real-time information during emergency events (e.g. natural disasters like earthquakes, cyclones, floods, fire, epidemics or man-made disasters like terror attacks, riots). During such an event, various information is posted on OSM, which can contribute significantly to relief operations. Additionally, crowdsourced content from OSM can also be utilised for emergency preparedness, such as for identifying disaster-prone regions and infrastructures, developing early warning systems, developing emergency-resilient communities, and so on.
Given the huge volume and the rapid rates at which content is posted on OSM, automated techniques and information systems need to be developed for extracting, summarizing and presenting the critical information in a useful way. The proposed workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers working on related fields to present their insights. The workshop aims to bring together researchers from diverse fields -- Information Retrieval, Data Mining and Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Social Network Analysis, Computational Social Science, Human Computer Interaction -- who can potentially contribute to utilising social media for emergency relief and preparedness. One specific objective of SMERP 2018 will be to promote multi-modal and multi-view information retrieval, i.e., developing methods for aggregating information from multiple online and offline data sources (including text, images, and video).
The secong edition of this workshop will consist of two peer-reviewed tracks: (1) a general track, and (2) a data-focused track, briefly described as below:
This track of the workshop aims to provide a research platform to explore the role of social media in emergency relief and management and requests for original research contributions related to the theme Exploitation of Social Media for Emergency Relief and Preparedness. The detailed aims and scope of this track are provided here.
Here we provide a dataset comprising of (i) tweets, (ii) images, and (iii) news reports, all published during a particular emergency event - the 2015 Nepal earthquake. We invite interested participants to develop methods to solve some practical challenges over the dataset.
More details are given here.
All submissions must be written in English following the ACM author guidelines.
Full papers must not exceed 5 pages, and short papers must not exceed 2 pages, including all diagrams, references, and appendices. Submitted papers should include the names and affiliations of all authors.
We solicit original contributions relevant to the workshop theme, that
have not been published earlier or are not under submission at any
other venue. Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed, and the accepted papers will be included in the conference companion proceedings.
At least one author of each accepted paper needs to register for the conference and present the paper at the workshop.
The papers for both the tracks should be submitted via Easychair. While submitting your paper through this Easychair link, please make sure to select "Exploitation of Social Media for Emergency Relief and Preparedness Workshop" as the track to which you are submitting.
The data request related correspondence for the Data-focused Track will be done via smerp2018 [at] gmail [dot] com.
For more details please see Call for Participation.
| January 22, 2018 | Paper submission due (extended) |
| February 15, 2018 | Notification of acceptance |
| February 28, 2018 | Camera-ready submission deadline |
| April 23, 2018 | Workshop |
For queries about the data challenge, you can mail smerp2018 [at] gmail [dot] com.
For any other queries about the workshop, you can mail the following organizers:
Saptarshi Ghosh: saptarshi [dot] ghosh [at] gmail [dot] com
Kripabandhu Ghosh: kripa [dot] ghosh [at] gmail [dot] com
