Social Media for Cold Management

Social media has been increasingly used to manage emergencies (hot management), yet it is still unclear to which extent its use is truly beneficial to manage calm situations (cold management). Take socioeconomic deprivation of cities. Measuring it in an accurate and timely fashion has become a priority for governments around the world. Traditionally, deprivation indexes have been derived from census data, which is however very expensive to obtain, and thus acquired only every few years. In recent years, we have proposed alternative computational methods to automatically extract proxies of deprivation at a fine spatio-temporal level of granularity [3]. We have also proposed new ways of determining which streets are safe from crime and which are walkable [1], and ways of profiling the functional and temporal uses of cities [2]. All this only requires access to freely available user-generated content (on, e.g., Foursquare, Open Street Map, Flickr), and, as such, is complementary to the use of expensive proprietary data and outdated governmental data.