SocialDrone: An Integrated Social Media and Drone Sensing System for Reliable Disaster Response

Social media sensing has emerged as a new disaster response application paradigm to collect real-time observations from online social media users about the disaster status. Due to the noisy nature of social media data, the task of identifying trustworthy information (referred to as truth discovery) has been a crucial task in social media sensing. However, existing truth discovery solutions often fall short of providing accurate results in disaster response applications due to the spread of misinformation and difficulty of an efficient verification in such scenarios. In this paper, we present SocialDrone, a novel closed-loop social-physical active sensing framework that integrates social media and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for reliable disaster response applications. In SocialDrone, signals emitted from the social media are distilled to drive the drones to target areas to verify the emergency events. The verification results are then taken back to improve the sensing and distillation process on social media. The SocialDrone framework introduces several unique challenges: i) how to drive the drones using the unreliable social media signals? ii) How to ensure the system is adaptive to the high dynamics from both the physical world and social media? iii) How to incorporate real-world constraints (e.g., the deadlines of events, limited number of drones) into the framework? The SocialDrone addresses these challenges by building a novel integrated social-physical sensing system that leverages techniques from game theory, constrained optimization, and reinforcement learning. The evaluation results on a real-world disaster response application show that SocialDrone significantly outperforms state-of-the-art truth discovery schemes and drone-only solutions by providing more effective disaster response.