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Social sensing is based on the idea that communities or groups of people can provide a set of information similar to those obtainable from a sensor network. Emergency management is a candidate field of application for social sensing. In this work we describe the design, implementation and deployment of a decision support system for the detection and the damage assessment of earthquakes in Italy. Our system exploits the messages shared in real-time on Twitter, one of the most popular social networks in the world. Data mining and natural language processing techniques are employed to select meaningful and comprehensive sets of tweets. We then apply a burst detection algorithm in order to promptly identify outbreaking seismic events. Detected events are automatically broadcasted by our system via a dedicated Twitter account and by email notifications. In addition, we mine the content of the messages …