PNNL

Abstract

A great amount of attention and consideration is being directed at possible applications of social media in many challenging areas. The use of social media has already shown its importance in the area of disaster response, where, each citizen is essentially acting as a sensor in reporting local conditions. In the aggregate, valuable information is obtained to enable a more effective response as well as provide timely information to those in the disaster area. No one needs to be trained to understand what constitutes a disaster, so a social media data stream from the public is literally always active and ready to engage. A similar but more focused approach is the use of crowdsourcing for science, where specific challenges in areas such as mathematics, astronomy, and biology are posted to social media and solved by the crowd.