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HUMAN+ Final Review Meeting ::: Ensuring Humanitarian Safety through Real-time Situational Awareness for Efficient Management of Refugee Movements

The final review meeting of the HUMAN+ project (https://giscience.zgis.at/human) took place virtually on 18 June 2020. The results of all the work packages were presented together with a live demonstration of the HUMAN+ situational awareness demonstrator. The results include methodological developments in analysing data from geo-social media, satellites, and in-situ cameras. Furthermore, the legal, sociological and ethical aspects of the developed methodologies constitute one of the central outputs of the project.

The GIScience team lab coordinated the project and was one of the leading partners in analysing social media data to investigate refugee movements. Based on real-world Tweets, refugee movements could be identified. Like this, HUMAN+ delivered additional information to public authorities and relief organisations. The developed methodologies by the team of the GIScience lab also led to an operational service, through which analysed Twitter information related to COVID-19 and refugees are currently produced twice per week. The information was used in real-world decision making in different crisis management boards by a variety of NGOs and governmental institutions. In a follow-up research effort, the project will be continued as "HUMAN+ Living Lab" to advance the developed methodologies and improve on information quality and reliability.