Abstract: Every 24 hours a member of the United States (US) Armed Forces commits suicide, while every hour a US veteran takes his own life. These statistics illuminate a deeply-rooted social crisis which eludes experts and military leaders to this day. Billions of dollars invested in suicide prevention seem to offer little relief for active duty servicemen and veterans alike. Military suicide is framed as a wicked problem and the new and exciting theory of Chronic Emotional Atrophy (CEA) is proposed to help explain causes of suicidal ideation in the military. A holistic crisis management strategy via information systems is presented in this work. Depressive symptoms exhibited by military members in emotionally suppressed environments closely parallel those phenomena exhibited by medical patients suffering from frontal lobe damage. The prospective psychiatric information system solution provides frontal lobe stimulation (FLS) to mitigate CEA and suicidal ideation.

Abstract: Social media together with still growing social media communities has become a powerful and promising solution in crisis and emergency management. Previous crisis events have proved that social media and mobile technologies used by citizens (widely) and public services (to some extent) have contributed to the post-crisis relief efforts. The iSAR+ EU FP7 project aims at providing solutions empowering citizens and PPDR (Public Protection and Disaster Relief) organizations in online and mobile communications for the purpose of crisis management especially in search and rescue operations. This paper presents the results of survey aiming at identification of preliminary end-user requirements in the close interworking with end-users across Europe.

Abstract: Microblogs are an opportunity for scavenging critical information such as sentiments. This information can be used to detect rapidly the sentiment of the crowd towards crises or disasters. It can be used as an effective tool to inform humanitarian efforts, and improve the ways in which informative messages are crafted for the crowd regarding an event. Unique characteristics of microblogs (lack of context, use of jargon etc) in Tweets expressed by a message-sharing social network during a disaster response require special handling to identify sentiment. We present a systematic evaluation of approaches to accurately and precisely identify sentiment in these Tweets. This paper describes sentiment detection expressed in 3698 Tweets, collected during the September 2010, San Bruno, California gas explosion and resulting fires. The data collected was manually coded to benchmark our techniques. We start by using a library of words with annotated sentiment, SentiWordNet 3.0, to detect the basic sentiment of each Tweet. We complemented that technique by adding a comprehensive list of emoticons, a sentiment based dictionary and a list of out-of-vocabulary words that are popular in brief, online text communications such as lol, wow, etc. Our technique performed 27% better than Bayesian Networks alone, and the combination of Bayesian networks with annotated lists provided marginal improvements in sentiment detection than various combinations of lists. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: Planning problems in a crisis context are a highly uncertain environment where health facilities must cooperate in providing health services to their patients. We focus on the health crisis in France due to the COVID19 pandemic. In fact, the lack of appropriate scheduling tools, resources, and communication leads hospitals to be submerged by infected patients and forced to transfer them to other hospitals. In this work we aim to provide a global solution to such planning problems to improve the current French health system. We introduce a cooperative approach called OPPIC (Operational Planning Platform for Inter-healthcare Coordination). OPPIC is based on a decentralized system, where health facilities plan is dynamic, flexible, robust to uncertainty, and respond to goals and optimization criteria. This paper proposed a first planning model to OPPIC and provided a first way of negotiation between health facilities based on their plan’s local and global flexibility.

Abstract: Micro-blogging site like Twitter, over the last decade, has evolved into a proactive communication channel during mass convergence and emergency events, especially in crisis stricken scenarios. Extracting multiple levels of information associated with the overwhelming amount of social media data generated during such situations remains a great challenge to disaster-affected communities and professional emergency responders. These valuable data, segregated into different informative categories, can be leveraged by the government agencies, humanitarian communities as well as citizens to bring about faster response in areas of necessity. In this paper, we address the above scenario by developing a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for multi-label classification of crisis related tweets.We augment deep CNN by several linguistic features extracted from Tweet, and investigate their usage in classification. Evaluation on a benchmark dataset show that our proposed approach attains the state-of-the-art performance.

Abstract: The goal of the paper is to discuss the framework for an interdisciplinary human-computer interactive technology that facilitates information and resource exchange and forms core groups for crisis management. The social networks discussed here are designed to incorporate local knowledge and participation and to foster institutional and academic ties by modeling interrelationships among global communities and exploring policy options. Social interactions between individuals and organizations are explored especially in situations when directed responses are helpful in predicting the complex interplay between social, political, and technological systems and practices that result in a transfer of information and resources in disaster situations. In the future, such networks shall identify patterns through which groups interact in responding to critical issues and shall incorporate more complicated actions by individuals and organizations allowing them to move away from a rigid path to manage disasters via the most situationally appropriate routes.

Abstract: ICT-enabled or digitalized co-production of public services has become increasingly relevant to emergency response and crisis management. This study provides a literature review on this phenomenon, exploring both large-scale crises and frequent emergencies. We found that research in the domain is scarce and focuses mainly on the phenomenon in terms of digital volunteerism. In large-scale crises, they mostly refer to spontaneous forms of volunteering, and in smaller emergencies, to more organized volunteers that collaborate with a response organization over time. Similarities to digitalized co-production in the public sector generally include financial, administrative, ICT, and demographic factors. Differences include, e.g., aspects of coordination, support, and processing by formal actors. We argue that there are benefits of adding a theoretical co-production perspective to digital volunteerism in emergency response and that our literature review can guide future research on models and (the double) use of volunteers in both kinds of emergencies.

Abstract: This paper is a case study of an emergency medical dispatch system that describes its operations and difficulties Emergency Management in Andalusia is the responsibility of the Internal Affairs Authority that operates in each province a Coordination Center that receives Emergency Calls and in cases where there is a medical emergency, passes the information to the Emergency Coordination Centers. The 112 Centers gather all the information generated in emergency situations and supposedly coordinate the response of the several emergency services (Police, and Fire Departments) that operate their own coordination centers. If necessary they send a medical request to the 112 Center that, acting as a hub, sends to EPES the information about the medical incident.

Abstract: This paper describes the design, execution, and results of a participatory design workshop with emergency public information officers (PIOs). During the workshop, PIOs and researchers explored ideas and designs for supporting the social media needs of PIO work. Results indicate that PIO perceptions of social media have changed as they have learned to incorporate activities of the public into their work, yet they still struggle with issues of trust and liability. Based on workshop design activities, the paper offers a set of design recommendations for supporting the social media needs of PIO work practice such as the ability to monitor, document, and report social media activity.

Abstract: On-line websites and applications are increasingly playing a role in disaster response and recovery. Yet with the wide variety of on-line grassroots activities that occur in such situations, it can be difficult to make sense of them. In this paper, we describe on-line behavior as socially convergent activity, interpreting it within existing sociological understandings of behavior in disaster events. We discuss seven types of convergent behavior and give examples of on-line activities for each type. By seeing these activities as an essential part of the disaster social arena, we can begin to think about how to support socially convergent phenomena in new and creative ways.

Abstract: In crisis management exercises the instructor's performance is critical to the success of the training. It is their responsibility to monitor and evaluate the exercise, as well as appropriately adjust and adapt the scenario to the unfolding events. Despite the importance of the instructor's skills in crisis management training little has been documented regarding successful methods or common pitfalls. The study presented in this paper is exploratory and aimed at investigating how instructors monitor and control large scale crisis management exercises. The results are intended to be used as a basis for further investigation on how instructors can be supported in virtual reality training systems. A summary of results from interviews is presented and followed by observations reports from two live exercises. Finally, key areas for instructor support in virtual-reality training systems are identified. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: In every disaster and crisis, incident time is the enemy, and getting accurate information about the scope, extent, and impact of the disaster is critical to creating and orchestrating an effective disaster response and recovery effort. The main goal of beAWARE framework is to provide support in all the phases of an emergency incident. More specifically, we propose an integrated solution to support forecasting, early warnings, transmission and routing of the emergency data, aggregated analysis of multimodal data and management the coordination between the first responders and the authorities.