NSF-funded Research and Crowdsourcing Come Together during the Chennai Floods

The objective of the recently awarded NSF project Social and Physical Sensing Enabled Decision Support for Disaster Management and Response is to use physical and social data to improve situational awareness during natural disasters. Prof. Sheth and his students at the Kno.e.sis center  working on this project sprung to action during recent Chennai floods and launched a Crisis Photo Map that harvest links to images from tweets related to Chennai Floods. The results of the crowdsourced geotagging of photos with neighborhood-level information by volunteers helps responders coordinate rescue by