UBC students teach computers to use Reddit to help NASA with landslides

A group of University of British Columbia (UBC) graduate students is helping NASA by teaching a computer to read news articles on Reddit in an effort to better predict landslides.

The project is led by master’s student Badr Jaidi, whose Social Landslides group has trained computers to scan the popular social media site for useful news articles about such events.

That information goes into the Cooperative Open Online Repository (COOLR), a public database used by NASA to try and predict where and when landslides will happen.

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Jaidi says the current COOLR process is “tedious,” as the information has to be manually submitted.

“Our tool automates that process, completing in minutes what previously might have taken months,” he said in a release.

Jaidi says the program is able to differentiate between articles on Reddit, so a news piece about someone winning an election in a “landslide” would not be included in the data about the geological event.

“In this way, the computer learns what information to automatically and accurately extract, including when a landslide happened and where, what caused it, and how many fatalities were involved,” he said.

B.C. is familiar with landslides. In late 2021, a catastrophic atmospheric river triggered widespread damage across southern parts of the province. Heavy rain that led to mudslides brought down infrastructure across many areas, including highways such as the Coquihalla, which was shuttered for several weeks for repairs.

Jaidi explains his tool is able go through a month’s worth of articles in about 15 minutes.

According to the World Health Organization, landslides are the most widespread geological event in the world.

“We wanted to start small and prove it works with Reddit. But it could be expanded to bigger platforms and sources, provided they have news articles,” he said.

The grad student adds NASA is currently looking at whether the tool can be used straight away or if adjustments need to be made.