SAVIZ

Abstract

Due to climate change and the effects of geopolitical and social challenges like the refugee crisis in Europe, the world is facing an unprecedented set of humanitarian problems. According to the United Nations, there is a projected funding shortfall of more than 20 billion dollars in addressing these needs. Technology can play a vital role in mitigating this burden, especially with the advent of real-time social media and advances in areas like Natural Language Processing and machine learning. An important problem addressed by machine learning in current crisis informatics platforms is situation labeling, which can be intuitively defined as semi-automatically assigning one or more actionable labels (such as food, medicine or water) to tweets or documents from a controlled vocabulary. Despite multiple advances, current situation labeling systems are noisy and do not generalize very well to arbitrary crisis data. Consequentially, consumers of these outputs (which include humanitarian responders) are unwilling to trust these outputs without due diligence or provenance. In this paper, we demonstrate an interactive visualization platform called SAVIZ that provides non-technical first responders with such capabilities. SAVIZ is completely built using open-source technologies, can be rendered on a web browser and is backward-compatible with several pre-existing crisis intelligence platforms. We use two real-world scenarios (the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, and the unfolding Ebola crisis in Africa) to illustrate the potential of SAVIZ.