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arXiv · 2412.12575

SIDE: Socially Informed Drought Estimation Toward Understanding Societal Impact Dynamics of Environmental Crisis

Lanyu Shang·Bozhang Chen·Shiwei Liu·Yang Zhang·Ruohan Zong·Anav Vora·Ximing Cai·Na Wei·Dong Wang
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Abstract

Drought has become a critical global threat with significant societal impact. Existing drought monitoring solutions primarily focus on assessing drought severity using quantitative measurements, overlooking the diverse societal impact of drought from human-centric perspectives. Motivated by the collective intelligence on social media and the computational power of AI, this paper studies a novel problem of socially informed AI-driven drought estimation that aims to leverage social and news media information to jointly estimate drought severity and its societal impact. Two technical challenges exist: 1) How to model the implicit temporal dynamics of drought societal impact. 2) How to capture the social-physical interdependence between the physical drought condition and its societal impact. To address these challenges, we develop SIDE, a socially informed AI-driven drought estimation framework that explicitly quantifies the societal impact of drought and effectively models the social-physical interdependency for joint severity-impact estimation. Experiments on real-world datasets from California and Texas demonstrate SIDE's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines in accurately estimating drought severity and its societal impact. SIDE offers valuable insights for developing human-centric drought mitigation strategies to foster sustainable and resilient communities.

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Lanyu Shang, Bozhang Chen, Shiwei Liu, Yang Zhang, Ruohan Zong, Anav Vora, Ximing Cai, Na Wei, Dong Wang. 2024-12-17. SIDE: Socially Informed Drought Estimation Toward Understanding Societal Impact Dynamics of Environmental Crisis. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12575

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