Using social media data to trigger EO processing and analyses

Challenge Description

The social networks have received an enormous boost in recent years and have now reached the center of society. The exploitation of the enormous daily flood of information contains a great potential for various applications; for example, it can be used to localize earthquakes. In this challenge, we aim at implementing a pipeline that uses Twitter data to identify locations of earthquakes and use the information to trigger EO data analysis. In the future, considering the rapid development and the increase of satellite constellations aimed at global coverage with revisit short revisit times, algorithms of this kind could be even used to prioritize satellite acquisitions for the detection of the areas mostly affected by earthquake damages, which can be different from the locations identified by the seismic data analyses as the source of the earthquake. The promoter of this challenge is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ).

Image: Using social media to map identify areas affected by earthquakes. Comparison of heatmap generated with Twitter occurrences and location of earthquakes in Japan