On 24 September a 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck south-west Pakistan, killing at least 300 people. The following day Patrick Meier at the Qatar Computer Research Institute (QCRI) received a call from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) asking him to help deal with the digital fallout -- the thousands of tweets, photos and videos that were being posted on the web containing potentially valuable information about the disaster.
To help make sense of the outpouring of data, Meier mobilised two new tools he had created, but had yet to release. The first, MicroMappers is a series of microtasking apps (called Clickers), which can be used to tag the mass of online user-generated multimedia content relating to a disaster to establish its importance. OCHA also reached out to the
Digital Humanitairan Network (DHN), which mobilised the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) to work with Meier's tools. The volunteers set to work and within the first few hours, 35,000 relevant tweets had been collected.
From there the tweets were uploaded to the TweetClicker, and those with images filtered into the ImageClicker to be analysed and tagged depending on the type of information they contained -- infrastructure damage and requests for help, for example -- so they could be distributed to the appropriate agencies. In all, 14,000 tweets were tweets and 341 images were collected by 100 volunteers in the first 30 hours.
This was the first test of the Clickers in a real-life disaster situation, and Meier has outlined in a blog post some of the glitches he's already come across -- how the pre-processing filters are supposed to automatically upload the relevant tweets directly to the Clickers, but currently can't, and how the VideoClicker and TranslateClicker would have been really useful, but are still in development.
There's obviously work yet to do to create the streamlined real-time response Meier envisages, but still the speed of mobilisation and the efficiency with which the big data was handled is truly a remarkable feat.
It also demonstrates the extent to which humanitarian disaster response has changed over a relatively short period of time. Back in 2011, Paul Conneally gave a TED Talk on digital humanitarianism. "The humanitarian model has barely changed since the early twentieth century," he said in opening statement. "Its origins are firmly routed in the analogue age, and there is a major shift coming."
He went on to identify the catalyst for this shift as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, a point that is echoed by seemingly everyone who works within the digital humanitarian space.
The effect of Haiti
Haiti was a turning point not because of the strategic, successful deployment of digital tools and analysis, but because people's social media and technology use had matured to the point where there was masses of relevant, accessible user-generated data, which for the most part was bewildering to agencies attempting to make sense of it.
A lot of work was done by organisations like Ushahidi, Crisis Mappers and OpenStreetMap, which attempted to patch together a picture of the country in the wake of all the destruction. At that time, Meier was working for Ushahidi and spearheaded the organisation's response in Haiti. With Haitians relying on SMS to communicate in the midst of the crisis, mobile phone charging stations sprung up among the Port au Prince rubble and much of the user-generated data was gathered from thousands of text messages.
"It was really really challenging for many reasons, but in part because I think this was our first battle with big data -- what I call big crisis data," says Meier. "We had hundreds of volunteers monitoring social media and news online and then we had set up this SMS platform to crowdsource text messages from disaster-affected communities in Haiti and we were just completely overwhelmed. We had this huge backlog of tweets, of text messages, that we never really were quite able to catch up on."
It wasn't just Ushahidi that struggled with masses of unexpected information though. The problem for the American Red Cross, says Gloria Huang from the organisation's communications team, was that while they were prepared to broadcast information about the disaster and what the agency was doing through blogs and social media, what they were not prepared for was influx of posts and messages from people who were suffering, or who knew people who were suffering. "[They] would say things like 'please come help get my cousin out of the rubble in Haiti' or 'there's a lot of need for help here and no-one's helping these people' -- information that was really helpful to people on the ground, but we being a two-person team sitting in the communications department in Washington DC, we didn't have a clear way of dealing with that information, or being able to provide it to the actual search and rescue teams on the ground. And of course the American Red Cross doesn't even have search and rescue teams, so it was even more complicated trying to figure out how to get the information to the teams on the ground that were actually doing this type of work."
Libya and the first wave of progress
It was only really after Haiti that changes began to take place. Meier helped to co-found the Digital Humanitarian Network, an umbrella group for volunteers that could be quickly activated in emergency situations. By the time the Pablo Typhoon hit the Philippines in December 2011, OCHA was able to produce the first ever UN crisis map based purely on crowdsourced information that had been consolidated and analysed from social media by volunteers.
During the Libya crisis, the UN partnered with the Standby Volunteer Task Force, and the OCHA was seriously impressed with the way the volunteers coordinated themselves using "open, collaborative-type solutions" across 80 or so different countries.
It made Andrej Verity, Meier's contact at the UN, question why OCHA wasn't using already technology like Skype, Dropbox and Google Docs for communication and organisation, both between offices, and also in the field to augment its "Who's doing What Where" coordination strategy. He took the concepts he saw the volunteers using and encouraged OCHA staff around the world to adopt them. "Traditionally they would be told to come to headquarters to ask a question and we would reply, whereas now there's often questions being answered between offices before we even get up in the morning. It's really changed internally how we can run a community of practice, or a community of interests or so on," he says.
Meier tells another side to the story though, because as coordinated as the volunteers were, the technology wasn't fast or efficient enough to facilitate their work. The deployment in Libya involved an effort on behalf of the volunteers unlike any other, requiring people to monitor social media, to geo-locate and verify messages 24 hours a day for a full month. The laborious manual work involved in the coordination effort, though, meant that many volunteers were burnt out by the end. "You can't just throw more volunteers at this problem. In fact we saw after that in the three years since, the number of active volunteers [was] dropping because it was such a tedious way to volunteer. Just staring at a load of Google spreadsheets for hours on end was just not fun, hugely conducive to making errors and it was just a whole mess."
Applying advanced computing to humanitarian challenges
Even before Libya, Meier realised that to lift some of the weight off the volunteers' shoulders, the solution was to develop microtasking tools, but Ushahidi did not have the bandwidth to develop the kind of advanced technology that was required. Big crisis data has a sell-by date on it that means if it's not filtered and analysed almost in real time, it quickly loses its value to those working in the field. "Time is not a luxury we have in disaster response," says Meier
Things really began to change when Meier was recruited to QCRI -- "I got started on what I wanted to immediately after Haiti" -- and he set about bridging the gap between the humanitarian community and technology community.
Finally he had the opportunity to work on the microtasking tools he believed would help overcome the hurdles presented to the volunteers by user-generated content. "The first challenge," he says, "is finding the needles in the haystack, and doing that in real time." From that starting point, he has used advanced computing to create a range of experimental tools, like MicroMappers, in partnership with OCHA.
AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response) was the second project tested for the first time during the Pakistan floods, and is due to be launched officially at the CrisisMappers conference in Nairobi in November. It's an open-source tool relying on both human and machine computing, allowing human users to train algorithms to automatically classify tweets and determine whether or not they are relevant to a particular disaster.
In Pakistan, SBTF volunteers tagged 1,000 tweets, out of which 130 were used to create a classifier and train an algorithm that could be used to recognise relevant tweets with up to 80 percent accuracy. "I don't think that's been done anywhere else, even outside the humanitarian space. It's really an open-source platform for this kind of real-time teaching of an algorithm. And what we want to do with this and other platforms is really to empower our digital humanitarian volunteers to be able to do what they do hundred times better and 100 times faster and with 100 times better user experience as well, so that people don't burn out."
The credibility issue
The main obstacle working against Meier and his tools is the the problem of credibility. Whether it's purposefully doctored photos, rumours and speculation or simply people getting the wrong end of the stick, in the midst of all the information relating to a disaster, there will always be red herrings and false information amid crowd-sourced data. "One of the things that we realised in the process of doing these live crisis maps with humanitarian organisations is that the big data challenge does make it a challenge for verification if you're overwhelmed with information," he says.
Meier has been working on an experimental platform called Verily that can "facilitate the rapid collection of evidence that can be used to either confirm or debunk rumours". It was inspired by a crowdsourcing model used by Riley Crane and his team at MIT to win Darpa's Red Balloon Challenge back in 2009. Crane won the challenge, which offered $40,000 to the individual or team that could find the correct location of 10 red weather balloons placed discreetly across the US, using social media.
The other method to quickly identifying false information is by using artificial intelligence. In a remarkable study around Hurricane Sandy, it was discovered that it's possible to predict which tweets contain false images to an accuracy of 97 percent.
The authors of the study used information forensics to examine the user profiles (how many followers, how many times listed, etc) and tweet content (length, use of punctuation, emoticons and hashtags) of tweets containing links to confirmed false image URLs to draw up a list of classifiers. From there they created an algorithm that could automatically rank the credibility of tweets during disasters.
Meier partnered with the authors of the study from Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi to work on a free open-source Twitter Credibility Plugin, that could be used to get a credibility score for each incoming tweet. "It's not a silver bullet, but they're getting pretty high, statistically significant results," he says, adding that because it works on AI, there will always be ways to game and sabotage it.
Of course Twitter's role in the rise of digital humanitarianism cannot be understated, and it is central to gathering data "for better or for worse", says Meier. Other platforms don't elicit the same kind of information from people, and neither is the information they do collect particularly accessible. Facebook's terms of service mean it's harder to filter public updates, Foursquare isn't as international, or really used by people during disasters, and you can't access metadata for the pictures on Instagram unless they are also posted as a geotagged tweet -- although even that doesn't guarantee accuracy.
Twitter itself clearly recognises that people turn to the platform during emergencies, as the same day that the MicroMappers tool was deployed for use in the Pakistan, it launched Twitter Alerts. This feature allows Twitter users to sign up to receive notifications from a list of credible partner organisations in case of an emergency. The introduction of Alerts, Meier says, is "clearly a big plus", but in the future he hopes users might be able to opt in to receive alerts that are "geo-customised" to their location at the time.
Of course Twitter is not as equally useful in all situations, as certain parts of the world do have a more limited social media footprint than in, for example, the Philippines, where there was an abundance of relevant tweets. This is an issue that the Digital Humanitarian Network has just come up against in the remote region of Pakistan, where it has been testing the MicroMapper Clickers.
Not many relevant tweets were discovered, whereas quite a lot of photos and videos put on the web by pro journalists were relevant.
As a result, Meier has adjusted the MicroMapper algorithm to gather images and videos from relevant news articles that have been tweeted, and in future these too will be uploaded to the Clickers too.
Hurricane Sandy and implementing digital tools in disaster response
The Red Cross, however, has found tools like Facebook quite useful in helping it to to implement its digital response in emergencies. After Haiti the communications team examined the kind of information that had been sent its way and worked out how it could best prepare itself and others within the organisation to respond to it in future. "We started looking at what that meant for the services we provided on a regular basis, for the disaster situations, going forward knowing that kind of information would be coming in and knowing that this is the way people would talk to us now as an organisation. This is how they reach out to the Red Cross and they expect a response, they expect us to be able to do something about it," says Huang.
By the time Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012, the Red Cross had an established digital operations centre kitted out by Dell in its Washington HQ, and had already started working with disaster services. During the hurricane, the team pulled in two million social media posts and were able to review, sort and capture about 3,000 for analysis. This filtered down to about 88 posts which were sent out to mass care teams, resulting in some changes on the ground -- an ambulance or supply truck being sent out somewhere, for instance.
"If you go back to where we were with Haiti, we couldn't do anything with the information, we were just shooting in the dark.
But with Sandy we managed to, for the first time, at least put a little bit of a structure around it. It absolutely wasn't optimised or efficient necessarily, but it was our first experiment and our first foray into it and we got a lot of feedback."
Similarly, the communications team trained staff and volunteers to converse with people using social media, so that when people reached out to them during a disaster they were able to engage with in similar ways over Facebook and Twitter as they would usually do in real-life disaster shelters. Their interactions usually involve giving emotional support when people are stressed, giving them advice about how to take care of themselves or giving them hotline numbers to call. "Our mission is the same as it's ever been: to provide hope and comfort during a disaster, to help people to be resilient, be prepared, to respond to an emergency and to recover well from it.
What has changed are the ways we can carry out our mission. We've diversified a little bit by being able to reach out to people in an online and to enable volunteers to help purely in a virtual space and we weren't able to do that before."
Who are the digital humanitarian volunteers?
The volunteers who dedicate their spare time to the American Red Cross, the SBTF and the DHN are a mixed bunch-- academics, students, translators, journalists, people in the diaspora -- who are as vital to digital humanitarian response as the technology they use. Around 60 percent of SBTF members already work in the tech or humanitarian fields, but the idea behind many of the tools developed by Meier is to make it possible for anyone to get involved.
Often in high-profile emergencies, says Verity, lots of people want to help out, whereas when disasters strike that perhaps don't receive much media attention or have a smaller diaspora, the number of volunteers is much lower. The result of this though is that the group will often be engaged because they'll have a vested interest in that region.
The key to mobilising them and keeping them engaged is one of the key issues facing Verity and Meier, which is why the DHN created a guidance document to outline how to best recruit, train and mobilise. An important factor to retaining volunteers, says Verity, is also to show them, and others, when they've made a difference.
"If they made an impact you want to make that public, you want things coming out from the UN Twitter handles, you want stuff going out on blog posts, you want media or somebody to pick it up, because you want the volunteers to see that the organisation respected and appreciated the work that they did."
The decentralisation of disaster response
There have even been occasions where the UN has been completely unable to help at all, and much of the support has relied completely on the volunteers. Verity points to the floods in Northern India in June this year, when the Indian government forbade OCHA from responding and providing assistance. This meant local NGOs were saddled with many of the geolocation coordination responsibilities that usually would fall to the UN. They couldn't turn to OCHA, but they could turn to the DHN, who ended up providing some of those services instead.
"What I find interesting is with new technologies, the big question is, is it reducing those barriers to entry into the humanitarian space, where other organisations, especially those augmented with a lot of virtual support, can start taking on roles that were traditionally mandated to other groups?" says Verity.
There is certainly a move towards decentralising disaster response, whether that be geographically, or in terms of organisations and agencies. For the Red Cross, says Huang, the idea is to be able to train local chapters so not everything has to be processed through Washington DC. "We want to be able to build this capacity across the country, so that next time a disaster happens, the person whose backyard the disaster has struck, that person can mobilise their own digital volunteers, and be able to respond and engage with their community on the level that we've managed to do here on the national level."
The key to this on a technological level appears to be free and open-source software. AIDR, for example, or the Red Cross First Aid app, which can be taken by other countries and adapted to incorporate emergency information purely suited their needs.
Similarly, making the tools simple enough to use that anyone can get involved in volunteering and empowering disaster-affected communities to help themselves has been one of the driving forces behind Meier's work. "That's why I wanted to bring MicroMappers in -- to democratise digital humanitarian volunteering, to lower the barriers to entry, so anybody who knows how to get online and use a mouse and speaks English or another language, can actually be a digital humanitarian volunteer," he says. "There's been this backlash in the digital activism space about clicktivism, or even slacktivism, well I'm saying no, wait, if you can click 'like' on a picture on Facebook, then you can be a digital humanitarian. I want clicktivism. Come here if all you want to do is click on things and still be actively operationally supporting disaster response."
This is a different message to the one we've been hearing for years whenever disasters strike -- that because we lack the specialist skillset we can't actually "do" anything to make a difference, beyond donating and fundraising. Organisations like OCHA and the Red Cross continue to play as important a role as ever during disasters, but technology is spreading the burden of responsibility. Maybe one day artificial intelligence will be so advanced that once again there will be no need for unskilled volunteers, but for now human computing is a huge part of coordinating humanitarian response, and the good news for the agencies and for us is that any human with access to a computer can get involved.
If you're interested in volunteering, take a look at the Standby Volunteer Task Force and the Digital Humanitarian Network for opportunities. Meier is also actively seeking volunteers to help test out MicroMappers, which is as simple as looking at pictures and pressing buttons.