Crowdsourcing support system for disaster surveillance and response

Experiences with past major disasters tell us that people with wireless devices and social network services can be effective mobile human sensors. Eye-witness reports taken at right locations can provide invaluable information and enable a disaster surveillance system to mend blind regions in sensor coverage. In this work, we develop a system, named CROSS, that supports crowdsourcing disaster surveillance data collection by volunteers exploring threatened areas. CROSS first broadcasts a volunteer request to the crowd via social network(s), such as Facebook, Twitter and so on. It then plans exploration routes for the volunteers responded to the request based on their locations.