Canadian students help NASA find landslides using Reddit
By Natasha O’Neill
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TORONTO (CTV Network) — A group of Canadian students are using a popular social media site to help gather information for a major space agency.
University of British Columbia graduate student Badr Jaidi and his team, the Social Landslides group, trained computers to “read” Reddit to help a NASA database.
The computers improve predictions of when and where landslides occur by processing news articles on the natural disasters and feeding the information to the public database, the Cooperative Open Online Repository (COOLR).
Jaidi and the team are completing their master’s degrees in data science at UBC.
“When we know where landslides are most likely to occur, there are some preventative measures that can be implemented to avoid that sort of damage,” Jaidi said in an interview with CTV News Vancouver. “So the more we understand landslides the more those measure can be implemented.”
Before the invention, people had to manually submit landslide information by searching through news articles. Now the tool automates the process, completing the search and submission in minutes.
The tool scans Reddit for news articles within a given period of time and extracts the relevant information. To weed out unhelpful information, the computer can tell if the word “landslide” is being used in a different context, like when someone wins “by a landslide.”
The team trained the computer to then process the natural language of landslide data so it can reconize relevant information.
“We would give it a news article, and ask where a landslide might have happened,” Jaidi explained in a post. “The model would predict the answer based on the language involved, for example, ‘The landslide most likely happened here, according to this sentence,’ and we would let it know if it was correct or not.”
The computer learns what information is required, like when a landslide happened, where, what caused it and how many fatalities were involved.
According to the group, the system can return a month’s worth of articles in about 15 minutes and can be fed into COOLR.
The World Health Organization says landslides are more widespread than any other geological event. Land with steep terrain previously burned by wildfires and channels along streams is most susceptible to landslides.
The team used Reddit because the site is free to access and has fewer restrictions. The students are confident the technology could be expanded to bigger platforms and be used for other natural disasters.
It took the students two months to complete the project.
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Sonja Puzic
