Wildfire: A Twitter Social Sensing Platform for Layperson

Zeyu Zhang, Zhengyuan Zhu, Haiqi Zhang, Foram Patel, Josue Caraballo, Patrick Hennecke, Chengkai Li

Abstract: We present Wildfire, an innovative social sensing platform designed for laypersons. The goal is to support users in conducting social sensing tasks using Twitter data without programming and data analytics skills. Existing open-source and commercial social sensing tools only support data collection using simple keyword-based or account-based search. On the contrary, Wildfire employs a heuristic graph exploration method to selectively expand the collected tweet-account graph in order to further retrieve more task-relevant tweets and accounts. This approach allows for the collection of data to support complex social sensing tasks that cannot be met with a simple keyword search. In addition, Wildfire provides a range of analytic tools, such as text classification, topic generation, and entity recognition, which can be crucial for tasks such as trend analysis. The platform also provides a web-based user interface for creating and monitoring tasks, exploring collected data, and performing analytics.