Dynamic Consensus Analysis of Social Media (DCASM) for Rapid Crisis and Disaster Response Information Discovery Navy SBIR FY2012.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2012.1 Topic No.: N121-092 Topic Title: Dynamic Consensus Analysis of Social Media (DCASM) for Rapid Crisis and Disaster Response Information Discovery Proposal No.: N121-092-0291 Firm: Perceptronics Solutions, Inc. 3527 Beverly Glen Blvd. Sherman Oaks, California 91423 Contact: Amos Freedy Phone: (818) 788-4830 Web Site: www.percsolutions.net Abstract: The abundance of social media in crisis situations offers tremendous opportunity for filling the information vacuum that typically exists in HA/DR operations. However, current systems for extracting information are limited by human-in-the-loop processing of media, and do not provide automated methods for separating signal from noise, extracting information, and trust validation in order to create actionable intelligence. Furthermore, many computational approaches to extracting information do not leverage insights into human interaction and communication that have been uncovered by social scientists. We propose to apply social science algorithms, originally developed for ethnographic study, to the problem of extracting actionable intelligence from social media in disaster situations. A shared experience of reality, especially a profound reality such as a crisis scenario, should be reflected in observed message patterns. The proposed system will discover the latent "real" experience creating these patterns by adapting a number of rigorously validated analytic techniques. This will not only provide fully automated methods for processing and filtering social media data, but will also clarify collective understandings of reported reality for evaluating the trustworthiness of that information, for identifying meaningful aberrations in these reports, for effectively categorizing this information, and reliable intelligence for use by crisis response units. Benefits: By bringing to bear over a century of anthropological and social scientific research on 21st century social media, the DCASM system will allow crisis response teams to realize the technological opportunity currently tantalizing them by translating the flood of unstructured "data" currently provided by social media into the fully developed, actionable "intelligence" they need in order to plan, monitor, and execute their humanitarian missions. While focused on crisis response, The DCASM system's utility extends to other scenarios where the flow of available data overwhelms the time users have available to process it into actionable form. Using the DCASM system, law enforcement agencies could host web sites on which those who witnessed potential criminal activity could submit reports. Since by its very design the DCASM system would be robust against malicious input, these reports would be automatically processed into reliable intelligence for officers to investigate further. Processing data rapidly in a trustworthy manner frees human officers to provide other services at no additional cost to the public. By leveraging the insight that the shared experience of reality guides and constrains people's reports of that same reality, the DCASM system challenges the larger research community to more fully explore the ways in which societies, cultures, and subcultures evolve their understandings and explanations of the changes taking place within and about them. The DCASM system could be used to parse the social media reports emerging from an event similar to the Arab Spring in real time so that social scientists and policy makers could more fully understand how the individuals experiencing these phenomena came to reimagine their societies. Return