Weekly Seminar: Amanda Hughes
March 28, 2024
Where: TMCB 1170
When: March 28th @11am
Talk Title: Navigating Crisis: Leveraging Social Media for Disaster Management
The ubiquity of social media platforms has revolutionized the way information is disseminated during crises. From natural disasters to public health emergencies, individuals turn to platforms like Twitter (now X), Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, and others to share real-time updates, seek assistance, and provide situational awareness. This flood of user-generated content presents both opportunities and challenges for emergency management. This presentation draws upon a blend of case studies and empirical research, including insights gleaned from my own work, to explore ways in which social media data analytics, geospatial mapping, natural language processing, and machine learning techniques can be leveraged to extract actionable insights from the vast volume of online information. Furthermore, I will discuss recent research aimed at mitigating challenges related to misinformation, aggregating data from multimodal sources, and enhancing machine classifier training through sustainable context-sensitive labeling methods in the disaster setting. Through interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative socio-technological solutions, I will demonstrate how we can harness the power of digital platforms to save lives, mitigate suffering, and foster disaster resilience in an increasingly interconnected world.
Amanda L. Hughes is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. As a recognized research leader in Crisis Informatics, her work investigates the use of information and communication technology during crises and mass emergencies with particular attention to how social media affect emergency response organizations. The goal of her research is to design, implement, and deploy software systems that improve crisis communications based on deep understandings of the social context in which they reside. Her research is funded by grants from NSF, the Knight Foundation, and NASA SERVIR. She also directs the Crisis Informatics Lab at BYU. Amanda received a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and a master's and PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder.