Joint Modeling of Social Media and CAD Data for Crisis Management Decision Support

Archived computer-aided dispatch (CAD) data has been beneficial for post-event analysis and continual improvement processes. First responder CAD data represents a potential data set that can be exploited by recently-emergent big data techniques. The criticality of first responder missions increases the importance of such efforts: the impact of CAD data analytics could be directly related to lives saved. Emergency management organizations are well aware of the power of social media (SM) to assist and improve response efforts. However, most are ill-equipped to ingest, process, and utilize in an intelligent, quantitative, and effective way, the enormous amount of SM data available. UtopiaCompression Corporation (UC) proposes to develop and deliver a comprehensive solution that can jointly analyze CAD and social media data in real time. This tool is intended to provide situational awareness, advanced analytics, visualization and decision support for crisis management, by detecting and classifying emergency events, and providing first responders with suggested courses of action. In Phase I, UC will (a) identify at least three emergency management scenarios for which the proposed tools may be applied; (b) develop its novel event detection, localization and tracking algorithm; (c) evaluate the developed system on candidate CAD/SM data sets to demonstrate proof-of-concept. The developed tool is expected to have significant commercial applications in a diverse range of tasks including automated threat assessment, disaster/crisis management and emergency response.