New research from Cardiff University, which analysed 1.6 million tweets from the London 2011 riots, has **ticed that the micro-blogging platform can be used to detect dangerous situations up to an hour faster than police reports.*
To do so, researchers created event detection algorithms that use various features of Twitter data — like sentiment, frequency of tweets containing certain words, and geolocation and timing of the tweets — to cluster "similar" content and produce interpretable summaries.* Read more...