A group of Canadian students uses a popular social media site to help gather information for a major space agency.
University of British Columbia graduate student Badr Jaidi and his team, the Social Landslides group, trained computers to “read” Reddit to aid a NASA database.
Computers improve predictions of the time and location of landslides by processing news articles about natural disasters and feeding the information to the public database, the Cooperative Open Online Repository (COOLR).
Jaidi and the team are completing their Masters in Data Science at UBC.
“When we know where landslides are most likely to occur, certain preventative measures can be implemented to avoid this type of damage,” Jaidi said in an interview with CTV News Vancouver. “So the more we understand about landslides, the more these measures can be implemented.”
Before the invention, people had to manually submit information about landslides by searching through news articles. Now, the tool automates the process, completing the search and submission in minutes.
The tool scans Reddit for news articles within a given time frame and extracts relevant information. To eliminate unnecessary information, the computer can tell if the word “landslide” is used in a different context, such as when someone wins “by a landslide.”
The team trained the computer to then process the natural language of landslide data so it could recognize relevant information.
“We would give him a news article and ask where a landslide might have happened,” Jaidi said in a post. “The model would predict the answer based on the language involved, for example, ‘The landslide most likely happened here, according to this sentence’, and we would let it know if that was correct or not.”
The computer learns what information is needed, such as when a landslide happened, where, what caused it, and how many deaths were involved.
According to the group, the system can return a month’s worth of articles in about 15 minutes and can be fed into COOLR.
The World Health Organization says landslides are more widespread than any other geological event. Lands with steep terrain previously burned by forest fires and canals along streams are most susceptible to landslides.
The team used Reddit because the site is free to access and has fewer restrictions. The students are convinced that the technology could be extended to larger platforms and used for other natural disasters.
It took the students two months to complete the project.