A group of Canadian students uses a popular social media site to help collect information for a major space agency.

Graduate student Badr Al-Jaidi from the University of British Columbia and his team trained computers to "read" Reddit to assist NASA's database.

The computers work on improving predictions related to when and where landslides occur by processing news articles about natural disasters and entering the information into the public database.

Al-Jaidi and the team are completing a master's degree in data science at the University of British Columbia.

Al-Jaidi said in an interview with CTV News Vancouver: "When we know where landslides are likely to occur, there are some preventive measures that can be implemented to avoid this kind of damage."

"So the more we understand landslides, the more possible it is to implement these measures."

Before the invention, people had to manually submit landslide information through searching news articles.

The World Health Organization says landslides are more common than any other geological event.

The students are confident in the possibility of expanding the technology to larger platforms and using it in other natural disasters. It took the students two months to complete the project.

The land with steep terrain previously affected by forest fires and the channels along streams are the most susceptible to landslides.