Intelligent Agent for Hurricane Emergency Identification and Text
  Information Extraction from Streaming Social Media Big Data
  This paper presents our research on leveraging social media Big Data and AI
to support hurricane disaster emergency response. The current practice of
hurricane emergency response for rescue highly relies on emergency call
centres. The more recent Hurricane Harvey event reveals the limitations of the
current systems. We use Hurricane Harvey and the associated Houston flooding as
the motivating scenario to conduct research and develop a prototype as a
proof-of-concept of using an intelligent agent as a complementary role to
support emergency centres in hurricane emergency response. This intelligent
agent is used to collect real-time streaming tweets during a natural disaster
event, to identify tweets requesting rescue, to extract key information such as
address and associated geocode, and to visualize the extracted information in
an interactive map in decision supports. Our experiment shows promising
outcomes and the potential application of the research in support of hurricane
emergency response.
