Research on Machine Learning for Disaster Response

For the first time in 2021, a major Machine Learning conference will have a track devoted to disaster response. The 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2021) has a track on "NLP Applications for Emergency Situations and Crisis Management". I am delighted to be the Senior Area Chair for this track! I've worked in machine learning and disaster response for 20 years and I'm glad that more people are now looking into how machine learning can help people at the most critical times. The majority of what goes into a paper on machine learning for disaster response should be the same as any other paper in applied science: reproducible methods that clearly advance our knowledge of how to deploy and evaluate machine learning technologies. However, there are aspects of disaster response that make some aspects of the science more important and a few aspects that are unique to disaster response.