[en] This paper describes a prototype system that integrates social media analysis into the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS). This integration allows the collection of social media data to be automatically triggered by flood risk warnings determined by a hydro-meteorological model. Then, we adopt a multi-lingual approach to find flood-related messages by employing two state-of-the-art methodologies: language-agnostic word embeddings and language-aligned word embeddings. Both approaches can be used to bootstrap a classifier of social media messages for a new language with little or no labeled data. Finally, we describe a method for selecting relevant and representative messages and displaying them back in the interface of EFAS.

[en] We introduce a new generalization of the Plateau problem which includes the constraint of enclosing a given region. Physically the problem is important insofar as it bears on sintering processes and on the structure of wetted porous media. Some primal and dual characterizations of the solutions are offered, and aspects of the problem are illustrated in one and two dimensions in order to clarify the combinatorial elements and to demonstrate the importance of numerous local minima. (orig.)