Cassandra Day Denver 2014

Crisis Informatics is an area of research that investigates how members of the public make use of social media during times of crisis. The amount of social media data generated by a single event is significant: millions of tweets and status updates accompanied by gigabytes of photos and video. To investigate the types of digital behaviors that occur around these events requires a significant investment in designing, developing, and deploying large-scale software infrastructure for both data collection and analysis. Project EPIC at the University of Colorado has been making use of Cassandra since Spring 2012 to provide a solid foundation for Project EPIC's data collection and analysis activities. Project EPIC has collected terabytes of social media data associated with hundreds of disaster events that must be stored, processed, analyzed, and visualized. This talk will cover how Project EPIC makes use of Cassandra and discuss some of the architectural, modeling, and analysis challenges encountered while developing the Project EPIC software infrastructure.