Usage of Social Media and Cloud Computing During Natural Hazards

Social media data have emerged as new sources for detecting and monitoring disaster events. Several recent studies have suggested that social media data streams can be used to mine actionable data for emergency response and relief operations. Such massive and rapidly changing data present several new grand challenges to archive and extract critical validated information for various disaster management activities. The volume, velocity, and variety of the data require advanced computing infrastructure technologies for big data management. Cloud computing is proposed as the ideal platform to address these computing challenges. This chapter discusses the opportunities and challenges associated with using social media to gain situational awareness during disasters and the feasibility of using cloud computing to build a resilient and real-time disaster management system. Several real case studies and applications are presented to illustrate how both social media and cloud-computing solutions are used for various natural hazards.