WWW'18 Workshop on Exploitation of Social Media for Emergency Relief and Preparedness: Chairs' Welcome & Organization.

User-generated content on online social media (OSM) platforms has become an important source of real-time information during emergency events. The SMERP workshop series aims to provide a forum for researchers working on utilizing OSM for emergency preparedness and aiding post-emergency relief operations. The workshop aims to bring together researchers from diverse fields - Information Retrieval, Data Mining and Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Social Network Analysis, Computational Social Science, Human Computer Interaction - who can potentially contribute to utilizing social media for emergency relief and preparedness. The first SMERP workshop was held in April 2017 in conjunction with the ECIR 2017 conference. This 2nd SMERP Workshop with The Web Conference 2018 includes two keynote talks, a peer-reviewed research paper track, and a panel discussion.