Abstract: Recent years have witnessed multiple international protest movements which have purportedly been greatly affected by the use of Twitter, a micro-blogging platform. Social movement actors in Iran, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan and Thailand are thought to have utilized Twitter to spread information, co-ordinate protest activities, evade government censorship and, in some cases, to spread misinformation. We propose a framework for conceptualizing and analyzing Twitter data related to contentious collective action crises. Our primary research goal is to delineate a framework informed with a social movements lens and to demonstrate the framework by means of Twitter usage data related to the Thailand protests of 2010. Our proposed framework concerns itself with two aspects of protest activities and Twitter usage, namely, analyzing the content and structure of messages and our construct of Twitter protest waves.

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: Scenarios can enhance the understanding of emergency teams about the factors which are involved in the definition of an emergency plan and how different actors participate in it. Cross-Impact Analysis aims at contributing to this goal through allowing the collaborative development of scenarios out of large event sets, and this ultimately reduces the complexity for estimating a working model. In this paper we analyze how to apply Cross-Impact Analysis for developing collaborative scenarios in Emergency Preparedness. In order to illustrate this research effort hypothetical results of a dirty bomb attack scenario exercise are presented. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate the ability of a group to create a working model of the scenario that may be used to examine the consequences of various assumptions about preparedness, plans, and the actions taken during the event. The method may be used as either a planning tool and/or a training tool. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: This paper describes the development of a framework targeted to technology providers to better understand the grand domain challenges of the emergency response and management community (EM). In developing this framework, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers interviewed subject matter experts (SMEs) across the EM domain and corroborated these findings with current literature. We are presently examining relationships and dependencies within the framework. We anticipate that a thorough understanding of these gaps and dependencies will allow for a more informed approach to prioritizing research, developing tools, and applying technology to enhance performance in the EM community.

Abstract: In this article, we briefly describe a crisis management case that has been chosen (in the European funded project PLAY) to test the federated-open-trusted platform for event-driven interaction between services. A description of such complex use case in natural language is obviously limited and should be completed with a formal description methodology to gather the necessary knowledge. Considering our technical requirements we suggest to combine the S-Cube approach with the model driven architecture approach to propose a complete and structured case study description framework. Then this article presents a nuclear crisis case modeled according to these guidelines.

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 this paper we illustrate (a) the background and goals of the interdisciplinary research project SAFEST and (b) first insights from the socio-scientific part within the project. Technical systems are often established without considering explicitly ethical, legal, and social implications. This frequently leads to a lack of acceptance. This paper aims at compiling an analytical scheme that tries to demonstrate the relevance of the social context for the emergence of different modes of acceptance in reference to surveillance systems at airports. It is intended to guide the technical experts to deal with and reflect acceptance issues in the process of technical development.

Abstract: During unforeseen situations of crisis such as disasters and accidents we usually have to rely on local news reports for the latest updates on casualties. The information in such feeds is in unstructured text format, however, structured data is required for analysis and visualization. This paper presents a system for automatic extraction and visualization of casualty information from news articles. A prototype online system has been implemented and tested with local news feed of road accidents. The system extracts information regarding number of deaths, injuries, date, location, and vehicles involved using techniques like Named Entity Recognition, Semantic Role Labeling and Regular expressions. The entities were manually annotated and compared with the results obtained from the system. Initial results are promising with good accuracy overall. Moreover, the system maintains an online database of casualties and provides information visualization and filtering interfaces for analysis.

Abstract: Emergency management tasks are inherently complex and dynamic, requiring quick knowledge sharing and decision coordination among multiple organizations across different levels and locations. However, there is a general lack of understanding about how to describe and assess the complex and dynamic nature of emergency management tasks and how knowledge integration help managers improve emergency management task performance. This paper describes a research project that aims at (1) developing the concepts of task complexity and uncertainty of emergency management tasks and (2) testing the mediating role of knowledge sharing and knowledge integration between emergency management task characteristics and performance. The overall research agenda, approaches, challenges and the advantages of utilizing a virtual Emergency Operations Center (vEOC) for this line of research are discussed.

Abstract: In this paper we describe the design and development of an interactive and generic agent based simulator, providing valuable support for organizing the emergency rescue plans of a large-scale accident. Analysis of real rescue activities has been conducted in collaboration with medical experts in order to understand the collaborative process and the involved actors and features. Based on the emergency analysis, an agent-based model and simulator was constructed including (1) the autonomous Agents – representing victims with evolving illness and rescuers (doctors, nurses, fireman) collaborating to rescue the first ones; (2) the Environment -representing the accident site having obstacles and dangerous areas and where the victims are initially spread and the doctors move to explore -perceive – treat and helpers evacuate; (3) the Interactions between rescuers – exploring collectively, evacuating by pairs, communicating directly or via artefacts- (4) the Organization of actors as distributed “independent” sub-teams in various site sub-zones or as a centralized whole team conducted by the rescue chief; and (5) the User interfaces allowing mainly initial configuration of the simulations (e.g. number of victims and states, followed strategies, rescuers behaviours), continuous visual control of the process of rescuing (e.g. site overview with acting-interacting agents, graphics, text descriptions), dynamic changes of parameters of an on-going simulation (e.g. adding new victims, adding new rescuers, or adding dangerous zones or new obstacles on sites) as well as step-by-step simulation. This simulation shows that it is possible to create a virtual environment with cooperating agents interacting in a dynamic environment. On-line and off-line analysis of simulation traces and results enable us first understanding complex situations in rescuing activities in large-scale accidents, and than planning for responding to crisis situation. This simulation approach is useful for identifying the best scenarios and eliminating potential catastrophic combinations of parameters and values, where rescue performance could be significantly impacted. © Proceedings ISCRAM 2004.

Abstract: Web 2.0 can be viewed as a platform where users can develop their own web applications. It is also characterized by a vast amount of user-generated contents presenting spatial and temporal components, by means of associated metadata. These metadata has been successfully exploited to generate map-based mashups (web applications gathering data from different sources) facing different kind of crisis situations, ranging from natural disasters (earthquakes, wildfires, floods...) to human-made disasters (terrorist attacks, school shootings, conflicts...). The social and collaborative dimensions of the Web 2.0 can be also exploited for managing crisis-related information. We present here a survey of current crisis-related mashups we employed to extract design dimensions and provide a conceptual framework that can be used: A) to understand current systems and; b) to design next generation of crisis-related mashups. We propose the eStoryS system as an example of application developed following the design principles presented in this paper. On the basis of our analysis, we believe that the design dimensions posited here provide useful insights for the design of novel web mashups in the emergency management domain.

Abstract: The possibility of crowdsourced information, multi-geographical and multi-organisational information flows during emergencies and crises provided by web 2.0 tools are providing emergency management centres with new communication challenges and opportunities. Building on the existing emergency management and social media literature, this article explores how institutions are using and adopting social media for emergency communication. By examining the drivers and barriers of social media adoption in two European governmental agencies dealing with emergencies, the paper aims to establish a framework to examine whether and how institutional resilience could be improved.

Abstract: Emergency response in disaster management using wireless sensor networks has recently become an interest of many researchers in the world. This interest comes from the growing number of disasters and crisis (natural or man-made) affecting millions of lives and the easy-use of new and cheap technologies. This paper details another application of WSN in the post disaster scenario and comes up with an algorithm for localization of sensors attached to mobile responders (firefighters, policemen, first aid agents, emergency nurses, etc) while assisted by a mobile vehicle (fire truck, police car, or aerial vehicle like helicopters) called mobile anchor, sent to supervise the rescue operation. This solution is very efficient and rapidly deployable since no pre-installed infrastructure is needed. Also, there is no need to equip each sensor with a GPS receiver which is very costly and may increase the sensor volume. The proposed technique is based on the prediction of the rescuers velocities and directions considering previous position estimations. The evaluation of our solution shows that our technique takes benefit from prediction in a more effective manner than previous solutions. The simulation results show that our algorithm outperforms conventional Monte Carlo localization schemes by decreasing estimation errors with more than 50%.