16- oxaster

An application that uses realtime tweets to help victims during natural disasters.

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Inspiration

This project was the challenge of J.P.Morgan, a "Social Good Challenge", which consists of having the best use of social media for disaster response.

natural disasters

During natural disasters, emergency phone lines are often overloaded with call volumes beyond their capacity. This can affect the ability of first responders to prioritize and identify individuals who have the greatest need for assistance and arrive in time. Often, during situations like these, affected individuals will utilize social media to broadcast their predicament. The information posted on social media, if utilized correctly, can then be used to augment information acquired from pre-existing lines of emergency communication, and that why we need Oxaster !

What it does

Oxaster acquires data from real tweets and perform analysis of the data to:

  1. Identify areas which are in greater need of assistance
  2. Identify the geographic areas where people may be experiencing life-threatening emergencies
  3. Identify geographic areas which are not impacted or where immediate needs have been largely met
  4. Notify first reponders of any developements in the situation that would be useful for them to know

How we built it

This app uses a framework to get tweets containing some keywords, inside a circular area which has a center and a radius as parameters.Then it filters the tweets using Azure Text Analytics API, which extracts the sentiment of the tweet, and keeps only the positive ones and plots the areas related to the locations collected of the victims on the map using Goole Maps API.

Challenges we ran into

Mostely in front-end, no one had a lot of experience with that, and also we realized that the lack of realtime information turns out to be a core issue to many problems, because the Twitter API has a limit of requests per 15 minutes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The search for tweets & sentiment analysis using azure, and integrating the google map on the website ( WE DID SOME FRONT, YEAY ! )

What we learned

Twitter API, Azure, Google Maps and mostly to have fun and discover the spirit of a hackathon.

What's next for oxaster

We will try to add a mobile app, which would be more practical for a volunteer and the dashboard would be used to send notification for them.

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