Establishing effective communications in disaster affected areas and artificial intelligence based detection using social media platform

Floods, earthquakes, storm surges and other natural disasters severely affect the communication infrastructure and thus compromise the effectiveness of communications dependent rescue and warning services. In this paper, a user centric approach is proposed to establish communications in disaster affected and communication outage areas. The proposed scheme forms ad hoc clusters to facilitate emergency communications and connect end-users/ User Equipment (UE) to the core network. A novel cluster formation with single and multi-hop communication framework is proposed. The overall throughput in the formed clusters is maximized using convex optimization. In addition, an intelligent system is designed to label different clusters and their localities into affected and non-affected areas. As a proof of concept, the labeling is achieved on flooding dataset where region specific social media information is used in proposed machine learning techniques to classify the disaster-prone areas as flooded or unflooded. The suitable results of the proposed machine learning schemes suggest its use along with proposed clustering techniques to revive communications in disaster affected areas and to classify the impact of disaster for different locations in disaster-prone areas

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

Waves of Change: Tourism and Vulnerability in San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua

Tourism is increasingly viewed and promoted as a viable and sustainable option for economic growth in developing countries. However, despite the rise of tourism and the growing popularity of hazard-prone destinations, little research has been done to assess the vulnerability of many tourism communities. What work has been done has focused primarily on post-shock management and planning without identifying underlying factors of vulnerability such plans would ideally mitigate. The goal of this thesis is to develop a methodology for assessing vulnerability in tourism communities in the developing world by assessing the vulnerability of the Nicaraguan community of San Juan del Sur. In 1992, the community was heavily damaged by a large tsunami. Since that event, the community has rebuilt and is now experiencing a boom in tourism. Field work conducted in the community suggests San Juan del Sur is highly exposed to future tsunami events and has heightened sensitivity to the effects of an event due to its heavy reliance on tourism activity

CHILDREN, LEARNING AND CHRONIC NATURAL DISASTERS: HOW DOES THE GOVERNMENT OF DOMINICA ADDRESS EDUCATION DURING LOW-INTENSITY HURRICANES?

By the time today’s Grade K students graduate high school in the Commonwealth of Dominica, they will have experienced five major and many low-intensity hurricanes (LIH). Between August and November each year, each hurricane, major or low-intensity, represents a major threat to their safety and schooling. This mixed-method case study investigated how the Government of the Commonwealth of Dominica (GOCD) addressed education during low-intensity hurricanes. I identified and discussed government’s assertions, actions and consequences associated with education and LIH. I reviewed ten official documents to identify government’s policies and assertions about education and LIH. I interviewed nine key senior or elite officers in the Ministries of Finance, Public Works and Education responsible for handling low-intensity hurricanes to identify their perspectives and actions. I also interviewed ten school principals who experienced Hurricane Dean in 2007 and Hurricane Ophelia in 2011 on their experiences and perspectives. Finally, I inspected ten school buildings to assess the extent to which repairs adhered to building codes and standards as mitigation strategy for LIH. Theoretically, this study proposed an adaptive developmental approach as an anticipatory approach that sustainably incorporates LIH into educational development, planning and operations. Results of this study indicated that government and its agencies adopted a response-recovery approach based on the perception of disasters as “Acts of God” and insufficient local funds to address them. This resulted in proposed externally-based funding strategies that have not been implemented since announced in 2006. There appears to be the desire to shift to anticipatory mitigation-risk reduction approaches rather than the present response-recovery approach. This would have to be articulated in language that is binding. Institutional and administrative frameworks for addressing low-intensity hurricanes and education were described as not meeting their mission and objectives. The result was a set of administrative failures that cascaded from the national to the ministerial level and onto schools putting children at risk as LIH events unfolded. Principals were left mostly on their own without the appropriate training, support and working communication links to address LIH; unable to safely evacuate students in the case of Hurricane Ophelia. The Ministry of education must become a lead agency in LIH management. The Ministry of Education needs to put in place policies, institutional and financial frameworks for managing education during LIH. This should include LIH professional development for teachers, principals and elite officers; development of school disaster plans; the conduct of regular disaster drills and exercises at schools, and rescheduling lost instruction days. Finally, LIH as chronic events must be incorporated into the plans, budget and operations of the Ministry of Education using the adaptive developmental approach. Keywords: education in emergencies, mixed-method case study; low-intensity hurricanes, adaptive developmental approach, disasters

An evolutionary theory of systemic risk and its mitigation for the global financial system

This thesis is the outcome of theory development research into an identified gap in knowledge about systemic risk of the global financial system. It takes a systems-theoretic approach, incorporating a simulation-constructivist orientation towards the meaning of theory and theory development, within a realist constructivism epistemology for knowledge generation about complex social phenomena. The specific purpose of which is to describe systemic risk of failure, and explain how it occurs in the global financial system, in order to diagnose and understand circumstances in which it arises, and offer insights into how that risk may be mitigated. An outline theory is developed, introducing a new operational definition of systemic risk of failure in which notions from evolutionary economics, finance and complexity science are combined with a general interpretation of entropy, to explain how catastrophic phenomena arise in that system. When a conceptual model incorporating the Icelandic financial system failure over the years 2003 – 2008 is constructed from this theory, and the results of simulation experiments using a verified computational representation of the model are validated with empirical data from that event, and corroborated by theoretical triangulation, a null-hypothesis about the theory is refuted. Furthermore, results show that interplay between a lack of diversity in system participation strategies and shared exposure to potential losses may be a key operational mechanism of catastrophic tensions arising in the supply and demand of financial services. These findings suggest new policy guidance for pre-emptive intervention calls for improved operational transparency from system participants, and prompt access to data about their operational behaviour, in order to prevent positive feedback inducing a failure of the system to operate within required parameters. The theory is then revised to reflect new insights exposed by simulation, and finally submitted as a new theory capable of unifying existing knowledge in this problem domain