MetroScope: An Advanced System for Real-Time Detection and Analysis of Metro-Related Threats and Events via Twitter

Jianfeng He, Syuan-Ying Wu, Abdulaziz Alhamadani, Chih-Fang Chen

Abstract

Metro systems are vital to our daily lives, but they face safety or reliability challenges, such as criminal activities or infrastructure disruptions, respectively. Real-time threat detection and analysis are crucial to ensure their safety and reliability. Although many existing systems use Twitter to detect metro-related threats or events in real-time, they have limitations in event analysis and system maintenance. Specifically, they cannot analyze event development, or prioritize events from numerous tweets. Besides, their users are required to continuously monitor system notifications, use inefficient content retrieval methods, and perform detailed system maintenance. We addressed those issues by developing the MetroScope system, a real-time threat/event detection system applied to Washington D.C. metro system. MetroScope can automatically analyze event development, prioritize events based on urgency, send emergency notifications via emails, provide efficient content retrieval, and self-maintain the system. Our MetroScope system is now available at http://orion.nvc.cs.vt.edu:5000/, with a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKIK9M60-J8) introducing its features and instructions. MetroScope is a significant advancement in enhancing the safety and reliability of metro systems.

Jianfeng He, Syuan-Ying Wu, Abdulaziz Alhamadani, Chih-Fang Chen, Wen-Fang Lu, Chang-Tien Lu, David Solnick, Yanlin Li:MetroScope: An Advanced System for Real-Time Detection and Analysis of Metro-Related Threats and Events via Twitter. SIGIR 2023: 3130-3134