Are you a data scientist? Learn about The science behind AIDR.

AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response) is a free and open source software that automatically collects and classifies tweets that are posted during humanitarian crises. There are far too much data produced via social media during crisis situations for humans to manage them on their own. In addition, the data are too rich and complex for machines to successfully process them. AIDR combines the best of both worlds by combining human and machine intelligence.

If you work in humanitarian or crisis response and are familiar with Twitter, you can use AIDR to gather and classify tweets about a particular situation. All you need to start is a list of keywords or hashtags, and/or a geographical region of interest. Once your collection starts and you begin to gather tweets, you will need to define different categories to label the information communicated in the tweets, for example "Medical Needs" or "Sheltering." You can create your own categories, or you can use the examples we provide.

The first step is to collect tweets related to a disaster. The Collector helps you do this by filtering tweets using keywords and/or hashtags such as "hurricane" and "#Sandy," for example. This is just like a regular search on Twitter.com, which means many of the resulting tweets will contain your keywords and/or hashtags, but will not be relevant to disaster response or to the specific information needs of humanitarian organizations. This is where the Tagger comes in.

While the Collector is a word-filter, the Tagger is a topic-filter. The tagger classifies tweets by topics of interest, such as "Infrastructure Damage," and "Donations," for example. The classification is done automatically based on a set of human-tagged items which are provided through MicroMappers.org. More than one person (if desired) can contribute to classifying tweets.

Once this is done, the "Tagger" automatically applies the classifier to incoming tweets collected in real-time using the Collector. All new tweets that relate to infrastructure damage (or other category) are automatically tagged and displayed on the Tagger, which you can use to power a live dashboard and/or crisis map.

• Want to see AIDR in action? Take a look at our video walk-through.

AIDR is licensed under an AGPL-3.0 license.