Dissertation title: 

Social Media in Disaster Management

Group: Water and Climate Risk, Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam

Promotor: Prof. Dr. Jeroen Aerts
Co-promotors: Dr. Brenden Jongman, Dr. Hans de Moel

Abstract:

This Ph.D. research focusses on the use of social media in disaster management. First, a global flood detection model is created. To this extend, tweets in 12 languages are collected, localized based on the mentions of locations, classified as flood-related or not. Finally, these localized and classified tweets are used to detect enhanced flood-related Twitter activity in about certain regions, which can then be labelled as floods. In addition, we perform a study on the integration of social media data in damage assessments.