Social media data has been increasingly used to facilitate situational awareness during events and emergencies such as natural disasters. While researchers have investigated several methods to summarize, visualize or mine the data for analysis, first responders have not been able to fully leverage research advancements largely due to the gap between academic research and deployed, functional systems. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and barriers for the effective use of social media data from first responders perspective. We present the summary of several detailed interviews with first responders on their use of social media for situational awareness. We further assess the impact of SMART-a social media visual analytics system-on first responder operations.
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