[apologies for cross-postings]

CALL FOR PAPERS

2nd International Workshop on Exploitation of Social Media for Emergency
Relief and Preparedness (SMERP)

In conjunction with The Web Conference (WWW) 2018

https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/kripa/smerp2018/

Lyon, France | April 23 or 24, 2018

User-generated content on online social media (OSM) platforms - such as
Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp - have become important sources of real-time
information during emergency events (e.g., natural disasters like
earthquakes, cyclones, floods, fire, epidemics or man-made disasters like
terror attacks, riots). During such an event, information posted on OSM
can contribute significantly to relief operations. Additionally,
crowdsourced content from social media can also be utilised for emergency
preparedness, such as for identifying disaster-prone regions and
infrastructures, developing early warning systems, developing
emergency-resilient communities, and so on. The SMERP workshop will
explore the multifarious aspects of effective information extraction and
exploitation from social media, for emergency relief as well as emergency
preparedness. The workshop includes two tracks, as described below.

(1) A general track which solicit original contributions related to the
theme, which includes (but is not limited to):

Multimodal and multi-view IR - aggregating information from multiple
online and offline data sources (including text, images, and video)

Addressing the code-mixed and informal vocabulary of OSM content

Transfer learning - applying models trained on prior emergency
event(s) on a future event

Detection of events and emerging themes

Real-time management and summarization of dynamic content streams

Detection of rumours and false news, verification of news and
identification of trustworthy sources

Geo-tagging and geo-localisation of content and sources

Social network models for information diffusion in emergency situations

Identifying disaster-prone or accident-prone regions and infrastructures

Designing crowdsourcing systems for emergency preparedness and
post-disaster relief

Building knowledge bases for automatically mining social media during
emergency



(2) A data-focused track, where we provide a dataset containing the
following data related to a particular emergency event (2015 Nepal
earthquake):

A set of microblogs (tweets) posted during the event

A set of images posted along with the tweets

A set of news articles about the event, posted on various news media
sites

Participants are invited to use this dataset to develop methods to solve
the following two tasks:

Task 1: Identifying information about infrastructure damage (from text or
image)

Task 2: Verification of information posted on social media, using news
articles

Additionally, participants are welcome to use the released dataset for
addressing some other problem (other than the two tasks specified above)
relevant to the workshop theme.

Those who submit to the data-focused track must use the released dataset
(they will be free to use any other data as well). The participants will
be expected to make all their code and results available, e.g., on Github,
so that reviewers can check them.

Paper submissions

Papers must be submitted in PDF in ACM sigconf format. Full papers must be
at most 5 pages, and short papers at most 2 pages. We encourage submission
of novel work-in-progress papers that show promising directions, and
papers that demonstrate systems that can be practically useful during
emergency events. Details can be found on the website
(https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/kripa/smerp2018/)

Important dates:

January 22, 2018: paper submission deadline (extended)

February 15, 2018: Notification of acceptance

February 28, 2018: Camera-ready submission deadline

The deadlines are at Anywhere On Earth
(https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/aoe) midnight.

Organizing Committee:

Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven, Belgium
(https://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~sien.moens/)

Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
(http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~gjones/)

Saptarshi Ghosh, IIT Kharagpur, India (http://cse.iitkgp.ac.in/~saptarshi/)

Debasis Ganguly, IBM Research, Dublin, Ireland
(http://researcher.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=ie-Debasis.Ganguly1)

Tanmoy Chakraborty, IIIT Delhi, India (http://faculty.iiitd.ac.in/~tanmoy/)

Kripabandhu Ghosh, IIT Kanpur, India
(https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/kripa/)


For details of the workshop, please check
https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/kripa/smerp2018/.

Kind Regards,

Kripabandhu Ghosh

Co-organizer

SMERP 2018 Workshop
The Web Conference (WWW) 2018