Transportation, Terrorism and Crime: Deterrence, Disruption and Resilience

Abstract: Terrorists likely have adopted vehicle ramming as a tactic because it can be carried out by an individual (or “lone wolf terrorist”), and because the skills required are minimal (e.g. the ability to drive a car and determine locations for creating maximum carnage). Studies of terrorist activities against transportation assets have been conducted to help law enforcement agencies prepare their communities, create mitigation measures, conduct effective surveillance and respond quickly to attacks. This study reviews current research on terrorist tactics against transportation assets, with an emphasis on vehicle ramming attacks. It evaluates some of the current attack strategies, and the possible mitigation or response tactics that may be effective in deterring attacks or saving lives in the event of an attack. It includes case studies that can be used as educational tools for understanding terrorist methodologies, as well as ordinary emergencies that might become a terrorist’s blueprint

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

HETEROGENEOUS DATA AND PROBABILISTIC SYSTEM MODEL ANALYSES FOR ENHANCED SITUATIONAL AWARENESS AND RESILIENCE OF CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE SYSTEMS

The protection and resilience of critical infrastructure systems (CIS) are essential for public safety in daily operations and times of crisis and for community preparedness to hazard events. Increasing situational awareness and resilience of CIS includes both comprehensive monitoring of CIS and their surroundings, as well as evaluating CIS behaviors in changing conditions and with different system configurations. Two frameworks for increasing the monitoring capabilities of CIS are presented. The proposed frameworks are (1) a process for classifying social media big data for monitoring CIS and hazard events and (2) a framework for integrating heterogeneous data sources, including social media, using Bayesian inference to update prior probabilities of event occurrence. Applications of both frameworks are presented, including building and evaluating text-based machine learning classifiers for identifying CIS damages and integrating disparate data sources to estimate hazards and CIS damages. Probabilistic analyses of CIS vulnerabilities with varying system parameters and topologies are also presented. In a water network, the impact of varying parameters on component performance is evaluated. In multiple, small-size water networks, the impacts of system topology are assessed to identify characteristics of more resilient networks. This body of work contributes insights and methods for monitoring CIS and assessing their performance. Integrating heterogeneous data sources increases situational awareness of CIS, especially during or after failure events, and evaluating the sensitivity of CIS outcomes to changes in the network facilitates decisions for CIS investments and emergency response.Ph.D

Transformer-Based Multi-Task Learning for Crisis Actionability Extraction

Social media has become a valuable information source for crisis informatics. While various methods were proposed to extract relevant information during a crisis, their adoption by field practitioners remains low. In recent fieldwork, actionable information was identified as the primary information need for crisis responders and a key component in bridging the significant gap in existing crisis management tools. In this paper, we proposed a Crisis Actionability Extraction System for filtering, classification, phrase extraction, severity estimation, localization, and aggregation of actionable information altogether. We examined the effectiveness of transformer-based LSTM-CRF architecture in Twitter-related sequence tagging tasks and simultaneously extracted actionable information such as situational details and crisis impact via Multi-Task Learning. We demonstrated the system’s practical value in a case study of a real-world crisis and showed its effectiveness in aiding crisis responders with making well-informed decisions, mitigating risks, and navigating the complexities of the crisis

The Global Risks Report 2016, 11th Edition

Now in its 11th edition, The Global Risks Report 2016 draws attention to ways that global risks could evolve and interact in the next decade. The year 2016 marks a forceful departure from past findings, as the risks about which the Report has been warning over the past decade are starting to manifest themselves in new, sometimes unexpected ways and harm people, institutions and economies. Warming climate is likely to raise this year's temperature to 1° Celsius above the pre-industrial era, 60 million people, equivalent to the world's 24th largest country and largest number in recent history, are forcibly displaced, and crimes in cyberspace cost the global economy an estimated US$445 billion, higher than many economies' national incomes. In this context, the Reportcalls for action to build resilience – the "resilience imperative" – and identifies practical examples of how it could be done.The Report also steps back and explores how emerging global risks and major trends, such as climate change, the rise of cyber dependence and income and wealth disparity are impacting already-strained societies by highlighting three clusters of risks as Risks in Focus. As resilience building is helped by the ability to analyse global risks from the perspective of specific stakeholders, the Report also analyses the significance of global risks to the business community at a regional and country-level