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.

翻译：本文介绍了我们利用社交媒体大数据及AI支持飓风灾害应急反应的研究。目前飓风紧急救援的应急做法高度依赖紧急呼叫中心。最近的哈维飓风事件揭示了现有系统的局限性。我们利用哈维飓风和相关的休斯顿洪水作为激励方案,开展研究并开发一个原型,作为在飓风应急反应中使用智能剂作为支持应急中心的补充概念的证明。这一智能代理被用于在自然灾害事件期间收集实时流传的推文,识别请求救援的推文,提取地址和相关地理代码等关键信息,并在决策支持中以互动地图显示提取的信息。我们的实验展示了支持飓风应急反应研究的有希望的结果和潜在应用。