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Tahora H. Nazer is a PhD student of Computer Science at Arizona State University. She joined Data Mining and Machine Learning Lab in 2014 and has been a research assistant since 2015. Her research interests are in data mining and machine learning. Her current focus is on disaster relief and response using social media. She has also worked on malicious user detection on social media and presented her work on bot detection in Information Assurance Symposium at Arizona State University in 2015. She has been sub-reviewer of several leading journals and major conferences.
Information Filtering in Social Media During Disasters
Disaster relief systems are built upon the assumption that information provided by volunteers is accurate. In recent years, social media have become widely used tools to assist in disaster relief. This essay brings to light the various types of unwanted data and their characteristics. Drawing on the case of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the essay shows how social media can support as well as impede relief efforts. The essay concludes with suggestions regarding how to ‘filter’ information so as to help make social media a more effective disaster relief tool.
