| Description |
Project Slándáil will demonstrate a cost-effective and ethically-correct way in which social media information can be used by an emergency management system. The social media landscape consists of a range of digitized documents in a variety of formats, updated by a diverse and geographically distributed people and organisations. During an emergency, authorities use websites and the population, empowered by social media systems, can broadcast for help or to inform others of their well-being. The burden of search and interpretation in the social media space, however, is largely on the end-users that is the authorities and the citizens. Information obtained during emergencies may contain personal details and the details may or not be correct – there are no protocols for dealing with the ethical and factual provenance of such data. Social media users deploy different modalities of communications, including language, visual icons, and associated meta data. Human beings integrate the information in different modality seamlessly to infer meaning and to make decisions. There are no systems that (a) could aggregate the information in different modalities, and (b) deal with multi-lingual communications during an emergency.
Project Slándáil is collaboration of emergency operatives, academics, ethics- and security-oriented NGO and four SMEs. Their common purpose is to make maximum ethical use of the information available in the social media to enhance the performance of emergency management systems. The Project will undertake research in text and image analysis, in ethical and factual provenance of data, together with SMEs specialising in selling systems for social media monitoring and for emergency monitoring. There are experts in human multi-lingual human communication working in the team. This is an Irish-led, Italian, German and British collaboration which will deliver next generation of emergency management systems.
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