The Problem
The Solution
The Method
The Future
For more information, such as presentations, written materials and links to other capstone projects from the iSchool @ UC Berkeley, please visit our Capstone Showcase Page!
For more information, such as presentations, written materials and links to other capstone projects from the iSchool @ UC Berkeley, please visit our Capstone Showcase Page!
Monitoring twitter allows Pressure to discover issues real-time by watching for activity spikes, no more waiting for the news. No more waiting fo the State Department to update their sites. Pressure gives you the alerts sometimes hours ahead of other information outlets.
Pressure knows your current location and the potential location of any activity and will give you phone numbers, directions and travel times to the nearest U.S. Embassy. It also gives you news and twitter feeds to keep you apprised of the current situation.
Available on all types of devices, Pressure works to keep the information simple, relevant and in context. This allows the user to quickly and easily notify their emergency contacts and see where threats might be. Putting the right information at your fingertips.
Finding yourself in a crisis situation in a dangerous, unfamiliar place can be truly terrifying. There is a large development community in place in Africa carrying out a myriad of humanitarian programs. There can be tens of thousands of foreign nationals on the ground there on any given day. Acts of terrorism, political unrest, disease outbreaks and natural disasters are not uncommon there. Seven of the ten most dangerous countries in the word are on the African continent. Once an afterthought, travel industry experts confirm that traveler safety there has become a primary concern in the last few years. Several applications have emerged in an attempt to address these risks. Some offer news and alert services, while others focus on location tracking and notification but they all have one thing in common: they are based on information obtained from news outlets or governmental organizations that can lag an actual event by precious minutes or even hours. None of them provide any on-the-ground condition visibility.
Contextually aware information can lead to better crisis situation outcomes.
The Twitter “Garden Hose” is connected to the free Twitter API that allows access to a subset of about 1% of the tweet stream for a given area. This twitter stream output is filtered by latitude and longitude so that only tweets that originate within the continent of Africa are collected. Tweets are loaded using Streamparse and Storm into a PostgreSQL database on an EC2 instance on AWS.
Alerts are triggered when a spike passed 500% of the moving daily average.
DisplayThe user interface relies heavily on Node.js, D3, Bootstrap and the Google APIs. The combination of technologies allows us to pinpoint accuracy of danger and directions to safe havens in order to avoid danger.
Geolocated alert size is correlated to percentage increase in tweet activity..
erts and location allow the traveller to make more informed decisions..
Next Steps:
Pressure continues to strive for advanced notification and safe passage for its users and those around them. Each new release adds functionality with safety in mind.
Please check out the working application, on your smartphone, laptop, desktop or tablet. We are always interested in improving this application, so please contact us with comments!