  Social media data has been increasingly used to facilitate situational
awareness during events and emergencies such as natural disasters. While
researchers have investigated several methods to summarize, visualize or mine
the data for analysis, first responders have not been able to fully leverage
research advancements largely due to the gap between academic research and
deployed, functional systems. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and
barriers for the effective use of social media data from first responders'
perspective. We present the summary of several detailed interviews with first
responders on their use of social media for situational awareness. We further
assess the impact of SMART-a social media visual analytics system-on first
responder operations.
