Abstract: Social media platforms, like Twitter, are increasingly used by billions of people internationally to share information. As such, these platforms contain vast volumes of real-time multimedia content about the world, which could be invaluable for a range of tasks such as incident tracking, damage estimation during disasters, insurance risk estimation, and more. By mining this real-time data, there are substantial economic benefits, as well as opportunities to save lives. Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic is attacking societies at an unprecedented speed and scale, forming an important use-case for social media analysis. However, the amount of information during such crisis events is vast and information normally exists in unstructured and multiple formats, making manual analysis very time consuming. Hence, in this paper, we examine how to extract valuable information from tweets related to COVID-19 automatically. For 12 geographical locations, we experiment with supervised approaches for labelling tweets into 7 crisis categories, as well as investigated automatic priority estimation, using both classical and deep learned approaches. Through evaluation using the TREC-IS 2020 COVID-19 datasets, we demonstrated that effective automatic labelling for this task is possible with an average of 61% F1 performance across crisis categories, while also analysing key factors that affect model performance and model generalizability across locations.

Abstract: Community-based disaster response is gaining attention in the United States because of major problems with domestic disaster recovery over the last decade. A social network analysis approach is used to illustrate how community-academic partnerships offer one way to leverage information about existing, mediated relationships with the community through trusted actors. These partnerships offer a platform that can be used to provide entré into communities that are often closed to outsiders, while also allowing greater access to community embedded physical assets and human resources, thus facilitated more culturally appropriate crisis response. Using existing, publically available information about funded community-academic partnerships in Wisconsin, USA, we show how social network analysis of these meta-organizations may provide critical information about both community vulnerabilities in disaster and assist in rapidly identifying these community resources in the aftermath of a crisis event that may provide utility for boundary spanning crisis information systems.

Abstract: Crises range from global catastrophes to personal disasters. However, systematic inquiry on crises rarely employs a comparative approach to examine commonalities between these seemingly very different events. We argue here that individual psychosocial disasters can inform a broader discussion on crises. Our approach applies general crisis theory to a smartphone based psychosocial support system for US military veterans. We engaged in a process designed to explore how veteran peer-to-peer mentorship can be augmented with IS support to display potential early warning signs as first step toward preventative intervention for high risk behaviors. To gain a better understanding of how military veterans might benefit from such a system, this article focuses on a community collaborative design process. The co-design process used the Small Stories method, allowing important cultural characteristics of to emerge, illuminating considerations in IS design with military veterans, and highlighting how humans think about crisis events at the individual level.

Abstract: In the context of COVID-19, this study utilizes the Social Mediated Crisis Communication Model (SMCC) and the Protective Action Decision Model (PADM) to investigate the relationship between social media users' protective actions and crisis information during public health crises in China. By constructing a structural equation model, this study aims to identify the influencing factors that affect social media users' personal’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions given crisis relevant information. Results findings are that warning information can significantly increase risk perception; emotional responses are not significantly affected by warning information and risk perception; risk perception has a negative impact on information gathering and sharing behavior; risk perception has a significant mediating effect on the relationship between information features and protective action.

Abstract: As crisis are complex systems, providing an accurate response to an ongoing crisis is not possible without ensuring situational awareness. The ongoing works around knowledge management and ontologies provide relevant and machine readable structures towards situational awareness and context understanding. Many metamodels, that can be derived into ontologies, supporting the collect and organization of crucial information for Decision Support Systems have been designed and are now used on specific cases. The next challenge into crisis management is to provide tools that can process an automated population of these metamodels/ontologies. The aim of this paper is to present a strategy to extract concept-instance relations in order to feed crisis management ontologies. The presented system is based on a previously proposed generic metamodel for information extraction and is applied in this paper to three different case studies representing three different crisis namely Ebola sanitarian crisis, Fukushima nuclear crisis and Hurricane Katrina natural disaster.

Abstract: Crisis detection can help enterprises to make full preparation to respond real crisis, so it is an important field to promote enterprises' competition and keep them develop continuously. Crisis in enterprises may be caused by many factors and most of them are very common and necessary parts in normal operating procedure. This paper takes these parts as crisis signals indicated in many managing books. Group decision-making strategy is put forward to help enterprises to analyze crisis signals based on the characteristics of the decision-making procedure. To get a meaningful and credible result, AHP is used to support the whole procedure. To exhibit the role of managers, system cluster is used to classify experts involved in decision-making procedure. An example to analyze a key engineer's dismissing is given to illustrate the decision-making procedure and to prove the efficiency of this idea and AHP method.

Abstract: Many cities, especially those in developing countries, are not well prepared for the devastating disaster of exceptional rain-induced waterlogging caused by extreme rainfall. This paper proposes a waterlogging scenario prediction and crisis management method for such kind of extreme rainfall conditions based on high-precision waterlogging simulation. A typical urban region in Beijing, China is selected as the study area in this paper. High-precision and full-scale data in the study area requested for the waterlogging simulation are introduced. The simulation results show that the study area is still vulnerable to extreme rainfall and the subsequent waterlogging. The waterlogging situation is much more severe with the increase of the return period of rainfall. This study offers a good reference for the relevant government departments to make effective policy and take pointed response to the waterlogging problem.

Abstract: Virtual teams are an important form of collaboration, especially in the context of transboundary crises. Achieving
team effectiveness through good sensemaking is key to virtual teams? success in responding to crisis. However,
there is still a lack of understanding about the relationship of this sensemaking in a virtual team during crisis to
the virtual team?s development of swift trust. Adapting from a model of sensemaking, in this paper, we propose a
research model to describe the relationships among swift trust, sensemaking and virtual team performance in the
context of virtual teams during crisis.

Abstract: Widespread disasters can overload official agencies' capacity to provide assistance, and often citizen-led groups emerge to assist with disaster response. As social media platforms have expanded, emergent rescue groups have many ways to harness network and mobile tools to coordinate actions and help fellow citizens. This study used semi-structured interviews and photo elicitation techniques to better understand how wide-scale rescues occurred during the 2017 Hurricane Harvey flooding in the Greater Houston, Texas USA area. We found that citizens used diverse apps and social media-related platforms during these rescues and that they played one of three roles: rescuer, dispatcher, or information compiler. The key social media coordination challenges these rescuers faced were incomplete feedback loops, unclear prioritization, and communication overload. This work-in-progress paper contributes to the field of crisis and disaster response research by sharing the nuances in how citizens use social media to respond to calls for help from flooding victims.

Abstract: In crisis management involvement of a large number of organizations is required. Not only the first responders need to take action, but also organizations and entities like civil authorities, public utility and crisis teams are responsible for critical infrastructures as well as the community. A key element for effective collaboration is situation awareness; having a common operational picture. So far research has mainly focused on situation awareness. However, several incidents show that situation awareness alone is not sufficient for reaching effective collaboration among the organizations involved. Collaboration awareness is a second key element. Knowing the needs, goals, expectations, culture, capabilities and procedures of the crisis management partners makes collaboration more effective. In this paper we elaborate our research focusing on what organizations need to know about each other in order to collaborate effectively. Finally, we describe the possible measures for increasing the collaboration awareness. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: It is a well-known fact that a lack of information will lead to suboptimal decisions. But even when actors jointly have all the information they need to make a well-informed decision, they may fail to find a superior alternative. This hidden profile paradigm would cause misrepresentations of crisis situations and lead to ineffective response. In this research-in-progress paper, we present the first stage of our experimental study on group decision making in humanitarian disaster response, in which we want to find out how teams can be supported to share more information, make better sense, and ultimately avoid such misrepresentations of crisis situations. First results reveal that humanitarian disaster response teams are able to share significantly more information if they would make use of more advanced information and communication systems. However, none of the teams in the experimental setup managed to find the optimal decision.

Abstract: Microblogging platforms have been increasingly used in crisis, facilitating more participatory communication between official response channels and affected communities. Despite the potential benefits, research has shown that disaster response organizations could not effectively utilize social media data due to data deluge (Knox 2022). To better understand the information needed for disaster response, we turn to the National Incident Management System Guidance for public information officers (PIOs) (NIMS Basic Guidance for PIOs 2020), the primary spokesperson for emergency management organizations. The guidance indicates that PIOs use social media for two major purposes, supporting their operational needs and gauging public perception of risk and incident response. To support the operational needs, the crisis informatics literature has heavily focused on information types supporting situational awareness, including serviceable, eyewitness or actionable information. However, the information representing public perception, such as people’s cognitive and perceptual processes in response to incidents, has been less addressed at scale. To bridge the gap between quantitative study in crisis informatics and information representing cognitive and perceptual processes and better support the task of PIOs, I focus on the study of people’s cognitive and perceptual processes on social media for my research. Cognitive and perceptual processes refer to the way that people pay attention to or process environmental inputs, including the mental activities of acquisition, processing or evaluation of environmental cues, social cues, and warnings. These processes reveal people’s perception of- and decision-making in response to potential threats. With this focus, I seek to answer the following research question: How could people’s cognitive and perceptual processes be inferred from their social media activities in crisis to benefit stakeholders in incident response? My interest in tracing this overall theme through a varied range of sub-tasks produces three more specific research questions: RQ1. How can information exposure and attention be operationalized to highlight cognitive and perceptual processes? RQ2. How do people’s perception of risk communications from stakeholders vary in crisis? RQ3. How could a principled and scalable pipeline be designed to identify people’s cognitive and affective perceptions on Twitter? I took cues from the Protective Action Decision Model (Lindell and Perry 2012) and leveraged baselines in the literature to address these research questions. To address the first research question, I proposed a metric that conceptualized and operationalized the predecision process. The proposed metric was incorporated into a pipeline and applied to two real-word events to recommend messages that represent the shift of collective attention of those locally affected with a specialized focus on cognitive and perceptual processes. To address the second research question, I went beyond the perception of risks to include perceptions of risk communications by stakeholders. I performed an empirical study of the relation between risk communications by stakeholders and different kinds of public perceptions (Lindell and Perry 2012). To address the third research question, I proposed a future work to provide benchmark coding schemes, datasets and models to quantitatively identify information representing cognitive and perceptual processes. I will leverage existing benchmark datasets in the literature (Olteanu et al. 2014; Imran et al. 2016; Alam et al. 2018; Zahra et al. 2020; Rudra et al. 2017; Mazloom et al. 2018; Purohit et al. 2018) and coding schemes in qualitative studies (Trumbo et al. 2016; Demuth et al. 2018) and create benchmark classification models.