Getting help in a crowd: A social emergency alert service

This paper presents the conceptual design of an emergency alert service which addresses the problem of getting help in a crowd. The design is based on the results of more than 30 years of research in social psychology on the bystander effect and it addresses the obstacles for helping by directing an alert directly to the members of the victim's social group who happen to be near the location of the emergency event. The proposed emergency recommender design combines the general availability of geo-location services with social clusters available either from the analysis of social web-sites or from communication analysis. For this purpose, two recently developed innovative clustering methods are used. The feasibility of the design is evaluated by simulating emergency events on the MIT reality mining data set.