National CalamityHelp Erupts for Kerala Flood Victims to Come Out of Crisis

Kerala is fighting the worst natural calamity ever in its history. Thousands of people are still stranded in the flood-hit areas. The tragic scenes of waterlogged houses were commonly viewed. Torrential rain and flood took 370 lives presently. The relief camps were thrust with 200,000 refugees. These figures are available on-paper. But, the real counts might be so far from counting.

The social media community, instantly, came to rescue the people in-need there. Apart from physical and monetary efforts, the educationists, data experts, developers and tech geeks had come up front. Together with diverse expertise, they delved in data mining services to evolve some innovative patterns so that the progression of SOS services would be meticulous and fast. Information and communication technologies were teamed up to pull the data of the help-seekers. But, the social media was really emerging in a pilot role.

1. Web Scraping: A team of software engineers, in the lead of a software engineer from IIT Hyderabad, has streamlined the data filtering process on keralarescue.in. Its database comprised 30,000 requests. The data entry and validation experts verified the genuine requests.

An association of six volunteers from across the country contacted the help seekers. It worked day and night while validating the requests. Eventually, it validated data entries guided the rescue rangers.

2. Tracing threads for help on Twitter: People have been taking Twitter as the best platform for open discussion. Professor Sreejith, from Computer Science department of IIT Hyderabad, sifted through its data. He filtered out requests for food and water. Subsequently, he bridged the rift between the suppliers/ volunteers from the unaffected regions & those flood victims.

3. Mining apps through Interactive Voice Response (IVR): A software engineer from Bangalore churned out apps by using his skills. He had set up an IVR system to attend each and every request for the food and supplies.

The software engineer, Anurag, stated that he established a hotline number to integrate with the IVR. This is how he gelled up the mined data of call requests with this system to answer the calls.

4. Mining business listing sites for crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing indeed came out as a great bridge between the suppliers and the request senders. It’s a practice of deriving information by enlisting a number of people together with through the internet.

The volunteers approached data research and data mining companies to cater the soaring demand of the affected people. For instance, Paytm did crowdsourcing by providing monetary help in Kerala.

5. Facebook mining for fund-raisers: Some web development and data scientists joined hand. They crunched Facebook data via mining, where more than 2 billion active users chat every day, to list down the suppliers. Millions of like-minded suppliers came upfront when they were approached.