Abstract: The proliferation of unmanned aerial systems (i.e., drones) can provide great value to the future of search and rescue. However, with the increase adoption of such systems, issues around hybrid human-drone team coordination and planning will arise. To address these early challenges, we provide insights into the development of testbeds in the form of mixed reality games with simulated drones. This research presents an architecture to address challenges and opportunities in using drones for search and rescue. On this architecture, we develop a mixed reality game in which human players engage with the physical world and with gameplay that is purely virtual. We expect the architecture to be useful to a range of researchers an practitioners, forming the basis for investigating and training within this unique, new domain.

Abstract: This paper details the creation of a massive (over 32,000 messages) artificially constructed 'Twitter' microblog stream for a regional emergency preparedness functional exercise. By combining microblog conversion, manual production, and a control set, we created a web-based information stream providing valid, misleading, and irrelevant information to public information officers (PIOs) representing hospitals, fire departments, the local Red Cross, and city and county government officials. Addressing the challenges in constructing this corpus constitutes an important step in providing experimental evidence that complements observational study, necessary for designing effective social media tools for the emergency response setting. Preliminary results in the context of an emergency preparedness exercise suggest how social media can participate in the work practice of a PIO concerning the assessment of the disaster and the dissemination of information within the emergency response organization and to the public.

Abstract: Failures in coordination and information sharing between relief agencies have increased the number of calls for innovative information system (IS) designs. While both the academic and the industrial communities have proposed many IS designs, methodologies for the ex-ante evaluation of such IS designs are scarce. Consequently, disaster IS architects are offered little guidance in the ex-ante evaluation process. Not only is it difficult to evaluate IS designs in practice, it is also difficult to include the conditions of disaster situations in the evaluation process. This paper explores the difficulties of ex-ante evaluation and discusses the suitability of the gaming-simulation methodology for the evaluation of principle-based IS designs. Gaming-simulation entails the use of professionals, scenarios and prototypes and can be adapted to a quasi-experimental form enabling researchers to control contextual interferences and rule out alternative explanations. This paper concludes with some discussions on the advantages and pitfalls of employing gaming-simulation for IS evaluation.

Abstract: As the geographic scale, operational complexity and frequency of disasters continues coupled with ever-increasing amounts of information related to disaster response activity, the crisis management practitioner and research communities are calling for new methodologies for processing and visually representing disaster information [1]. More specifically, there is a growing body of research focused on how analytical outputs based on remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) such as disaster impact assessments can be formatted into usable information products for crisis management practitioners[2]. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: In emergencies, exceptions to data protection raise concerns that data may become available to unexpected actors during and after a crisis, resulting in privacy intrusion and social sorting. Apart from ethical issues, there are legal issues, for example around data minimization and issues around social and cultural practices of sharing information. This paper explores key ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI) in utilizing cloud computing for disaster response and management and some examples of innovative design.

Abstract: Disaster Management often involves using Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to manage large amounts of data efficiently. Data gathered from disasters are often related to geographic locations, such as the affected geographic region, thus requiring special forms of data management software to utilize and manage them efficiently. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are specialized database systems with software that can analyze and display data using digitized maps and tables for decision making. Preparing and correctly formatting data for use in a GIS is nontrivial, and it is even more challenging during disasters because of tight time constraints and inherent unpredictability of many natural disasters. This paper describes the important role of GIS in disaster management, and discusses the most common characteristics of GIS and their potential use in disaster response. We follow up with a detailed description of the GIS prototype in the Sahana Disaster Management System.

Abstract: The initial impact of a disaster can lead to a variety of associated hazards. By taking a multi-hazard viewpoint with respect to disaster response and recovery, there is an opportunity to allocate limited resources more effectively, particularly in the context of long-term planning for community sustainability. This working paper introduces an approach for extending quantitative resource allocation models to consider multiple interrelated hazards. The discussion is motivated by a literature review of existing models and then focuses on changes necessary to take the multiplicity of hazards into consideration in the context of decision support systems for disaster operations management.

Abstract: Modern critical infrastructure (CI) systems are tightly coupled, resulting in unprecedented complexity and difficulty to predict, limit and control the consequences of disruptions caused by hazards. Therefore, a paradigm shift in disaster risk management is needed: instead of focusing on predicting events, resilience needs to be improved as a basis for adequate response to any event. This paper starts from a definition of CI resilience that provides a basis for quantitative and qualitative decision support. For the quantitative modelling approach, which aims at measuring the resilience of individual CIs, we focus on two CIs of fundamental importance for disaster response: transportation and power supply. The qualitative framework details relations between CIs. The results of this research are illustrated by a case study that analyses the impact of Hurricane Sandy. The findings highlight the need for a framework that combines qualitative and quantitative information from heterogeneous sources to improve disaster resilience.

Abstract: Social media has enabled people to circulate information in a timely fashion, thus motivating people to post messages seeking help during crisis situations. These messages can contribute to the situational awareness of emergency responders, who have a need for them to be categorised according to information types (i.e. the type of aid services the messages are requesting). We introduce a transformer-based multi-task learning (MTL) technique for classifying information types and estimating the priority of these messages. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach with a variety of metrics by submitting runs to the TREC Incident Streams (IS) track: a research initiative specifically designed for disaster tweet classification and prioritisation. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance in most metrics as compared to other participating runs. Subsequently, we find that an ensemble approach combining disparate transformer encoders within our approach helps to improve the overall effectiveness to a significant extent, achieving state-of-the-art performance in almost every metric. We make the code publicly available so that our work can be reproduced and used as a baseline for the community for future work in this domain.

Abstract: In emergencies, preparation is of paramount importance but it is not sufficient. As we know, emergency agencies develop extensive (text) plans to deal with accidents that could occur in their territories; their personnel train to enact such procedures, but, despite that, the unpredictable conditions that occur during an emergency require the ability to adapt the plan promptly. This paper deals with the last mile of a process we defined for enabling the adaptive execution of such emergency plans. In previous works, we discussed how to convert a free-text plan into a structured-text form, represent this plan using standard modelling notations, and extract goals that plans prescribe to be fulfilled. In this paper, we propose an approach for executing these plans with a workflow execution engine enriched by the capability to support runtime adaptation.

Abstract: This paper describes an information system designed to be deployed in emergencies caused by sudden onset natural disasters. The aim is to streamline the communication flow and collaboration between media, aid workers and government agencies with the affected population, to help the latter get verified, accurate and actionable information that will enable them to make decisions and recover from the disaster. The Emergency Information Service (EIS) system also provides means for affected population and field workers to channel vital data back up into aid response. This tool is part of a free information service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation to help survivors of natural disasters. It will serve the affected populations, local media and relief responders by providing fast, practical and verified information in local languages through the best means available.

Abstract: Major incidents and disasters tend to be highly complex, contain high levels of uncertainty and may often force official responders to set aside their standard operating procedures and work collaboratively with a range of agencies and actors on the ground. Prior work has shown that establishing clear lines of communication and maintaining a shared understanding across organisational boundaries can be challenging to achieve, particularly in stressful and unusual circumstances. In the present paper we discuss ongoing work into specifying a meta-process for facilitating communication and collaboration based on the observation that common themes that emerge in communication within and across organisational boundaries can subsequently be tracked and built into an Ontology Broker. This work draws on experimental work in our laboratory, observations made in emergency control environments and, emphasised in this paper, lessons learned in the 2005 London bombings. © 2012 ISCRAM.