Social Media in Crises and Conflicts

The aim of this track is to showcase current research on how the use of Social Media can help in crisis management and response. We invite papers that provide rich description and/or evaluation of the design and/or actual use of Social Media for collaboration and/or widespread participation in any phase of crisis management, from initial planning and preparedness, through detection, response, and recovery phases.

TRACK FORMAT

Classical Presentations with feedback regarding the extension towards a journal paper and panel discussions among presenters afterwards

TRACK TOPICS

Possible topics of interest for this track include the following:

• Studies of the use of social media in crises and conflicts, either for information sharing that can provide useful information for managers and citizens, as a pull technology, or for dissemination of information to the public as a push technology. This includes identification of barriers to effective use of social media by emergency response agencies, and the use of social media to “visualize” or make sense of an evolving crisis.
• Innovations in design or use of social media that solve potential problems such as issues of information overload, assessment of information trustworthiness, or ethical issues such as privacy.
• Identification and extraction of situational awareness and actionable information from social media and techniques for mining and near-real-time processing of social media data to enable early decision-making.
• Studies of crowdsourcing and other new practices such as the use of “digital volunteers” that engage the public and connect communities.
• Case studies and best practices on the use of social media for crisis response

We are currently exploring options where papers submitted to this track can potentially be published in a special issue to a reputable journal.

TRACK CO-CHAIRS Imran Muhammad Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar Dr. Imran has been actively working in the areas of information processing, information extraction, web engineering, and human-computer interaction. Before joining QCRI, Dr. Imran was a PhD candidate at the University of Trento, where he specifically worked in the Distributed Systems and Data & Knowledge Management research programs. Starr Roxanne Hiltz New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Information Systems, defined the electronic frontier with her groundbreaking research and prescient, award-winning books about the impact of virtual online communities and the potential of communicating through computers. Amanda Lee Hughes Brigham Young University, USA Amanda Lee Hughes is an assistant professor in the Information Technology Program at Brigham Young University. Prof. Hughes' research interests lie in understanding the issues that arise when information communication technologies (ICTs) are introduced into social contexts (and vice versa). Her overarching goal in conducting this type of research is to implement and deploy software systems based on deep understandings of the social context in which they reside. Christian Reuter Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany Christian Reuter is Professor for Science and Technology for Peace and Security (PEASEC) at the Department of Computer Science with secondary appointment in the Department History and Social Sciences at Technische Universität Darmstadt. His research focuses on studies about and the design of interactive and collaborative technologies in context of crises, security, safety, and peace. He has published about 150 scientific articles in Computer Science, Information Systems, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Collaborative Work, Crisis-, Security-, Safety- and Peace-Research and Social Media.