Demo Abstract: Social Media-Driven UAV Sensing Frameworks in Disaster Response Applications

UAV-based physical sensing has become a reliable sensing instrument that utilizes physical sensors installed on drones. However, various limitations (e.g. requiring manual input and finite battery life) hinder their mass adoption in disaster response applications. In contrast, social sensing is protruding as a new sensing paradigm that leverages “human sensors” to collectively obtain information about the physical world. In this demo, we compare and contrast several UAV-based sensing solutions, social sensing solutions, and hybrid solutions utilizing both social sensing and UAVs in disaster response applications. We evaluate the systems on a real-world disaster response case study which exhibits the detection effectiveness and swiftness of the integrated social and drone based framework, namely Social-Drone. The demonstrated framework highlights the importance of a closed-loop integrated social-physical sensing system and presents significant performance gains in terms of accuracy and deadline hit rate.