Research about human factors is necessarily related to examining the opinions, beliefs and feelings in society. Conducting surveys has been a traditional way to identify the social, economic, environmental and cultural factors related to disaster-resilient society that concern citizens the most.
The Brussels-based research team in Belgium developed a programming method that can be used to mine data from social media in order to examine how individual communicate and behave. This can be used for analysis of:
- building the resilience of society
- raising disaster risk awareness
- enabling an effective response to disasters, etc.
They recently produced research on big data and how social media can be used to measure people's reactions to the UN Sustainable development goals and thus make them more effective. These skills can be used in the context of a DR01 project consortium in which they would be available for a role that fits their profile and perform tasks as required by the project.
The college also offers courses and does research on history of global conflicts and global security, migration and cultural diversity in Europe, NATO and transatlantic approaches to security, terrorism, counterterrorism and (de-)radicalisation. They have recently developed a course that requires substantial creativity to communicate complex issues related to machine learning and data mining to students who do not have substantial IT training.
These skills and experience could be used in the consortium for the call SU-DR01-2020 "Human factors, and social, societal, and organisational aspects for disaster-resilient societies" to develop trainings and using the method to teach and advance researchers.They are looking to join a consortium as a partner under a research and development agreement.
Advantages & innovations
- Mining social media has an advantage over conducting surveys since this way we can get rich, authentic and unsolicited data on people's perceptions and experiences.
- Programming in R and Python is done by social scientists who are skilled in quantitative analysis of economic and social issues. This is an advantage since it adds a multidisciplinary dimension to the project.
- The social scientists in the team have vast experience in communicating research results to both academic audience and policy makers.
Stage of development
Under development/lab tested
Partner sought
The team is looking to join a consortium to provide information based on its research output. This will help the consortium to develop content for better digital and physical security practices as well as ensuring buy-in from the public.
They are looking to integrate into a consortium of experienced partners active in secure societies topics that can put their existing method and data to active use.