Automatically Classifying Text Messages (SMS) for Disaster Response

Humanitarian organizations like the UN and Red Cross often face a deluge of social media data when disasters strike areas with a large digital footprint. This explains why my team and I have been working on AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response), a free and open source platform to automatically classify tweets in real-time. Given that the vast majority of the world’s population does not tweet, we’ve teamed up with UNICEF’s Innovation Team to extend our AIDR platform so users can also automatically classify streaming SMS.

After the Haiti Earthquake in 2010, the main mobile network operator there (Digicel) offered to sent an SMS to each of their 1.4 million subscribers (at the time) to accelerate our disaster needs assessment efforts. We politely declined since we didn’t have any automated (or even semi-automated way) of analyzing incoming text messages. With AIDR, however, we should (theoretically) be able to classify some 1.8 million SMS’s (and tweets) per hour. Enabling humanitarian organizations to make sense of “Big Data” generated by affected communities is obviously key for two-way communication with said communities during disasters, hence our work at QCRI on “Computing for Good”.

AIDR/SMS applications are certainly not limited to disaster response. In fact, we plan to pilot the AIDR/SMS platform for a public health project with our UNICEF partners in Zambia next month and with other partners in early 2015. While still experimental, I hope the platform will eventually be robust enough for use in response to major disasters; allowing humanitarian organizations to poll affected communities and to make sense of resulting needs in near real-time, for example. Millions of text messages could be automatically classified according to the Cluster System, for example, and the results communicated back to local communities via community radio stations, as described here.

These are still very early days, of course, but I’m typically an eternal optimist, so I hope that our research and pilots do show promising results. Either way, we’ll be sure to share the full outcome of said pilots publicly so that others can benefit from our work and findings. In the meantime, if your organization is interested in piloting and learning with us, then feel free to get in touch.