Data Scientists Use Social Media to Map Hurricane Irma’s Flooding

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 “Downtown #Miami looks like a watery war zone,”
 <a href="https://twitter.com/nlitenmebabe/status/907069349986488320">
 tweeted
 </a>
 one user on September 10, 2017, as Hurricane Irma ripped through the city. The attached video showed wind and water battering the sides of high-rise buildings.
 

 The tweet was part of a spike in social media activity that now comes hand-in-hand with natural disasters. This time, a team from MIT’s Urban Risk Lab put social media to work in one Florida county.
 

 With Irma bearing down, the researchers piloted a free, online tool to crowd-source information about flood conditions from social media and post it to a map in real-time, allowing emergency managers better respond to local needs.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/hurricaneflood.width-990_DSrTLnD.jpg"/>
<figcaption>An online tool gathers information from social media about flood conditions and creates a map in real-time.
 
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 Even though the tool received little traffic during Irma—it was tested in an area that suffered less flooding than anticipated—the researchers and emergency responders saw the pilot as successful – the beginning of a partnership between MIT scientists, local government, and the public.
 

 “When the [weather] event is over, residents often have the best information about the situation near them, and through smartphones and social media, we now have the network to be able to collect information,” said Tomas Holderness, a research scientist at the Risk Lab who led the project.
 

 To use the tool, called RiskMap.us, users simply send a message to the project’s “chatbot,” which replies automatically with a one-time link to fill out a flood report, which is then added to an interactive map. The tool is linked to Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram, a text messaging app.
 

 The researchers partnered with officials from Broward County and originally planned to launch it after this year’s hurricane season, but, with Irma bearing down, the team put it online. Broward is Florida’s second most populous county, home to just under two million people, including the city of Ft. Lauderdale.
 

 Over the weekend, Irma’s path shifted west, and Broward County experienced only a fraction of the flooding that was anticipated. This was good news for both county officials, and it still gave the researchers enough data to test their tool.
 

 Though the map received only one completed flood report and the team saw just a handful of posts on social media from Broward County, over 8,000 people viewed the map during the storm, Holderness said, all data that the team can put to use.
 

 “In the background, we were collecting analytics and looking at social media as a whole and seeing what was going on, so it’s given us a lot of information that we can use to hone the system,” said Holderness.
 

 “I think that for this storm, because we launched it so late…we weren’t really able to witness its capability,” said Lenny Vialpando, deputy director of Broward’s Environmental Protection and Growth Management Department. With a concerted media campaign before the start of hurricane season, Vialpando said that he thinks the message will catch on.
 

 Holderness said that while RiskMap.us is currently only capable of handling flood data, Irma created other hazards that the team hopes to find ways to capture with the tool for future natural disasters.
 

 “We would love for people to be able to report that their power is out, that the street light is out, that they’ve got wind damage, that a tree was down,” Vialpando said. “We can start staging resources and start requesting things before the storm is over.”
 

 RiskMap.us is an expansion of a project called PetaBencana that Holderness co-developed in 2014 to map flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia, during the monsoon season. The city’s government was very receptive to the project, Holderness said, and integrated the map into their emergency response process.
 

 Holderness joined the Risk Lab a year ago and worked with the lab’s director, Miho Mazereeuw, to create a version of the tool for urban areas in the U.S., starting with Broward County.
 

 “A lot of people were really keen to use it, we had a couple of messages from people in southern counties—‘Can you turn it on for our county?’” said Holderness, who added that expanding the tool would not be a technical challenge.
 

 “It’s a people problem,” Holderness said, “we need to make sure that we’re working in a way that is complementary to existing emergency management systems.”
 

 In the coming year, Holderness said that the team hopes to bring the tool to more counties in Florida and other urban areas in the U.S.
 
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 Photo credit:
 <a href="http://www.seymourjohnson.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2001645842/">
 Airman 1st Class Ashley Williamson / Seymour Johnson Air Force Base
 </a>

Sensors Could Reduce Food Suppliers' (Unintended) Wastefulness

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 When we think about wasting food, we’re likely to remember the browned bananas or moldy bread we tossed in the trash last week. While changing our behavior at home is important,
 <a href="https://www.wri.org/sites/default/files/reducing_food_loss_and_waste.pdf">
 studies
 </a>
 have estimated that around 39% of global food waste happens before items even hit store shelves.
 

 Much of this waste is caused due to the logistics of the supply chain. When vegetables are packed away in shipping containers, food suppliers have no way of knowing if things are starting to rot. By using specialized sensors to sniff out the food’s freshness in real-time and transmit updates to suppliers,
 <a href="http://www.c2sense.com/">
 C
 
 2
 
 Sense
 </a>
 , a Cambridge-based start-up, hopes to reduce waste.
 
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<img alt="" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/veggies2.width-990_mkw6pkg.png"/>
<figcaption>When vegetables are packed away in shipping containers, food suppliers have no way of knowing if things are starting to rot.
 
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 The sensor systems, or “electronic noses,” have been around for several years, but have never caught on in the food industry due to cost and lack of accuracy. But Jan Schnorr, CEO of C
 
 2
 
 Sense, thinks their approach can finally get the sensors out of the lab and into the supply chain.
 

 “We focused on creating the next generation of sensing technology, that is smaller and easier to produce, but also with a big emphasis on specificity,” said Schnorr. “Specificity is how sensitive and accurate your sensors in responding to different chemicals.”
 

 Giorgio Sberveglieri, emeritus professor at the University of Brescia, Italy, who has studied chemical gas sensors for over 30 years, agrees with Schnorr. The challenge lies in creating a sensor that is both able to detect only select compounds that make up the smells of interest, and reliably return to a neutral state.
 

 “A bottleneck is occurring where sensor manufacturers are trying to produce very low-cost sensors that aren’t affected by interference or drift, the loss of sensing accuracy over time,” said Matteo Falasconi, a chemical gas sensor researcher at Brescia. Last year, he and Sberveglieri founded
 <a href="http://www.nasys.it/">
 Nasys
 </a>
 , a start-up tackling many of the same issues as C
 
 2
 
 Sense.
 

 The backbone of C
 
 2
 
 Sense’s nose is a web of tiny carbon tubes that react in response to different chemicals, Schnorr said, but the specificity of the sensors comes from “selectors,” specialized compound added to the nanotubes to increase the reactions to different compounds in the air.
 

 But what about cost? The sensors, said Schnorr, are just “one to three cents of material,” and very easy to produce.” Plus, C
 
 2
 
 Sense
 <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/21/vc-deals-of-the-week-gogoro-slack-patreon-mealpal-and-more.html">
 recently raised $3.2 million
 </a>
 in investments and caught the attention of MIT’s technology-focused venture firm, The Engine.
 

 “We always look for teams with an authentic connection to their mission,” said Reed Sturtevant, general partner and board member at The Engine, who is working with C
 
 2
 
 Sense. “We saw how deeply committed Jan and the team are to this path of helping sense something new in the real world.”
 

 Schnorr and Sturtevant both view The Engine’s support of C
 
 2
 
 Sense as crucial to getting the technology off the ground, and recognize the sensors’ potential, with some more testing and tuning, to make a big impact on food waste and beyond.
 

 “If I step back a little bit, the whole interface between the digital realm and physical realm is a very deep and rich area for invention, both on the science and the engineering side,” said Sturtevant. “The gap in sensors is in detecting the chemical compounds in the air around us. That’s a very deep and rich area to dig into.”
 

 “Then there has always been a gap between people doing the applied work in the lab and people moving it to market,” said Schnorr. “You have larger venture funds who could support a startup, but those don’t typically work with startups at an earlier stage, like C
 
 2
 
 Sense. The Engine is filling exactly that gap with the depth that they have in their team with all the support.”
 

 In the next 12 months, Schnorr hopes that C
 
 2
 
 Sense will be able to get their electronic nose “out to the world, to more customers, to chicken houses, to more food storage facilities, to industrial safety, to people in adjacent industries.”
 

 Tackling global food waste will require creativity and ingenuity, both from us at home, and from researchers developing electronic noses to sniff the food when we cannot.
 
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 Photo credit: Public Domain

Frankie Schembri

Articles

Data Scientists Use Social Media to Map Hurricane Irma’s Flooding

Sensors Could Reduce Food Suppliers' (Unintended) Wastefulness

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