Abstract: One of the main design challenges of any Emergency Management System (EMS) is the diversity of users and responsibilities that must be considered. Modelling the access capabilities of different communities of users is a relevant concern for which the RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) paradigm provides flexible and powerful constructs. In this paper we describe how we used an RBAC meta-model to specify at different levels of abstraction the access policy of a specific EMS called ARCE (Aplicación en Red para Casos de Emergencia). This approach has made it possible to face access modelling at earlier development stages, so that stakeholders got involved in analytical and empirical evaluations to test the correctness and effectiveness of the access policy. Moreover, since the RBAC meta-model is embedded into a web engineering method, we put into practice a holistic process which addresses different design perspectives (structure, navigation, presentation, interaction and access) in an integrated way.

Abstract: Drought is a complex climate phenomenon with slow emergence and quick vanish, which makes it hard for stakeholders to respond to drought timely. To reduce the vulnerability of our society to future drought, a better understanding of how society responds to drought is critical. Here, we propose a pilot study about social response to a recent California drought through social media. In this study, we identify the most important users using an extension of PageRank algorithm. We investigate the key drivers of the public activity in February, 2014 during the California drought. We also create a word cloud visualization from the most retweeted tweets. Lastly, we specify the information sources from those tweets. The findings of this study inform us that big data can help us to improve the current drought response plans through fundamental understanding of social response to drought, which is applicable to other natural hazards.

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: 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 research explores the potential determinants of trust in newly formed virtual teams to better inform the choice of communication media for virtual emergency response groups for which interpersonal trust is crucial. Results of a laboratory experiment indicate that the way that communicants view their teammates and themselves as part of that team is significantly correlated with the level of trust that they experience. Impression formation, public self-awareness, perceived social presence, and self-disclosure are all found to have significant correlations with trust among ad hoc teammates. It is therefore recommended that the design of emergency response communication systems include features to foster these feelings thereby promoting trust among teammates. Our results are applicable to ad hoc emergency teams who interact for a period of time to address relief and recovery efforts after a major disaster or emergency.

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: 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: Over the last decade, the disaster response landscape is increasingly complemented by voluntary citizen initiatives on digital platforms. These developments have opened up opportunities for response agencies and NGOs to organize local community involvement. In this paper we focus on the question how citizen involvement can be proactively organized toward disaster relief and what kind of dilemmas may arise in this process. We studied Ready2Help, an online platform developed by the Dutch Red Cross. Bringing together 36.000 volunteers, the platform plays a significant role in addressing the current refugee crisis. In our analysis we demonstrate the platform?s potential, but also note a tension between control and cooperation. Our results indicate that, in contrast to their initial objective, during the crisis the Red Cross falls back on principles of control to organize citizen response efforts. We end by discussing our future research agenda aimed at bridging formal and emergent citizen responses.

Abstract: This paper describes our work in progress on an approach and technology for providing integrated data access in situational awareness applications – particularly for disaster and emergency response. The key new aspect of our work is an approach where information aggregation, processing, and integration capabilities are offered as a service to any new application builder. Further, we provide a framework for possibly reusing prior information integration knowledge, the development of which demands the major fraction of time and complexity in a new application, in a customized fashion for new application. Our overall goal is to provide a framework where integrated access to critical data in an emergency response situation can be enabled very rapidly and by personnel with basic IT and data handling expertise. Our approach, while general purpose, is currently motivated by and grounded in the context of situational awareness systems for incident commander decision support in the fire response domain.

Abstract: Continuous Auditing systems require that human judgment be formalized and automated, which can be a complex, costly and computationally intensive endeavor. However, Continuous Auditing systems have similarities with Emergency Management and Response systems, which integrate Continuous Auditing's detection and alerting functions with the tracking of decisions and decision options for the situations that could be more effectively handled by human judgment. Emergency Management and Response systems could be an effective prototype to help overcome some of the implementation obstacles that are impeding Continuous Auditing systems' implementation rate. Continuous Auditing has the potential to transform the existing audit paradigm from periodic reviews of a few accounting transactions to a continuous review of all transactions, which thereby could vastly strengthen an organization's risk management and business processes. Although Continuous Auditing implementations are occurring, their adoption is slower than expected. With the goal of providing an empirical and methodological foundation for future Continuous Auditing systems and possibly inspiring additional investigation into merging the Continuous Auditing and Emergency Management streams of research, this paper provides several definitions of Continuous Auditing, suggests possible architectures for these systems, lists some common implementation challenges and highlights a few examples of how Emergency Management research could potentially overcome them.

Abstract: The goal of this article is to introduce a platform (called Agility Service) that gathers and analyses data coming from both crisis response and crisis field by using the principles of Complex Event Processing. As a crisis situation is an unstable phenomenon (by nature or by effect of the applied response), the crisis response may be irrelevant after a while: lack of resources, arrival of a new stakeholder, unreached objectives, over-crisis, etc. Gathering data, analyze and aggregate it to deduce relevant information concerning the current crisis situation, and making this information available to the crisis cell to support decision making: these are the purposes of the described platform. A use case based on the Fukushima's nuclear accident is developed to illustrate the use of the developed prototype.

Abstract: In response to natural and man-made hazards multiple organisations usually are involved in a very complex situation. On the other hand, extreme weather situations due to the climate change create hazards in areas which were considered safe before. In order to improve the capabilities of involved organisations in responding and preparing for disaster events, the availability of an efficient information sharing approach is a key enabler. To this end, we propose a communication system based on a content oriented architecture tailored to disaster management. It includes a catalogue that is offering web services for publishing and subscribing of disaster information and for further collaboration amongst agencies and first responders. Moreover, the considered approach also allows for full content access control and enables a flexible system. The paper shows the current status of the system design. Next steps will include the implementation and evaluation of the approach.