Citizens' observatories for situation awareness in flooding

Citizens' observatories are emerging as a means to establish interaction and co-participation between citizens and authorities during both emergencies and the day-to-day management of fundamental resources. In this paper we present a case study in which a model of citizens' observatories is being been translated into practice in the WeSenseIt project. The WeSenseIt citizens' observatory provides a unique way of engaging the public in the decision-making processes associated with water and flood management through a set of new digital technologies. The WeSenseIt citizens' observatory model is being implemented in three case studies based in the UK, the Netherlands and Italy. We describe the findings and our experiences following preliminary evaluations of the technologies and the model of co-participation and describe our future research plans

Modeling uncertain and dynamic casualty health in optimization-based decision support for mass casualty incident response

When designing a decision support program for use in coordinating the response to Mass Casualty Incidents, the modelling of the health of casualties presents a significant challenge. In this paper we propose one such health model, capable of acknowledging both the uncertain and dynamic nature of casualty health. Incorporating this into a larger optimisation model capable of use in real-time and in an online manner, computational experiments examining the effect of errors in health assessment, regular updates of health and delays in communication are reported. Results demonstrate the often significant impact of these factors

Improving emergency plans management with SAGA

[EN] Emergency plans are the tangible result of the preparedness activities of the emergency management lifecycle. In many countries, public service organizations have the legal obligation to develop and maintain emergency plans covering all possible hazards relative to their areas of operation. However, little support is provided to planners in the development and use of plans. Often, advances in software technology have not been exploited, and plans remain as text documents whose accessibility is very limited. In this paper, we advocate for the definition and implementation of plan management processes as the first step to better produce and manage emergency plans. The main contribution of our work is to raise the need for IT-enabled planning environments, either at the national or organization-specific levels, which can lead to more uniform plans that are easier to evaluate and share, with support to stakeholders other than responders, among other advantages. To illustrate our proposal, we introduce SAGA, a framework that supports the full lifecycle of emergency plan management. SAGA provides all the actors involved in plan management with a number of tools to support all the stages of the plan lifecycle. We outline the architecture of the system, and show with a case study how planning processes can benefit from a system like SAGA.We thank J. Marzal and R. Garrido, from the UPV Prevention Service, for their cooperation in the early design of SAGA. The work of J.H. Canós, M.C. Penadés, M. Llavador and A. Gómez is partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (MEC) under grant TIPEx (TIN2010-19859-C03-03). The work of M.R.S. Borges is partially supported by grant nos. 560223/2010-2 and 308003/2011-0 from CNPq (Brazil) and grant no. E-26/103.076/2011 from FAPERJ (Brazil). The cooperation between the Brazilian and the Spanish research groups was partially sponsored by the CAPES/MECD Cooperation Program, Project #169/PHB2007-0064-PC.Canos Cerda, JH.; Borges, M.; Penadés Gramage, MC.; Gómez Llana, A.; Llavador Campos, M. (2013). Improving emergency plans management with SAGA. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 80(9):1868-1876. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2013.02.014S1868187680

Designing for a Repository of Virtual Crisis Management Tabletop Exercises – Lessons Learned from a Scandinavian R&D Project

Crisis training exercises play a vital role in preparing local and regional governments for the management of crises and disasters. Unfortunately, conducting sufficient training is demanding, especially in small municipalities, due to constrained time and personnel resources, but also complex planning and scheduling of the dominant on-site training methods. Virtual training has been suggested as a resource-efficient and flexible complement. However, despite numerous specifications of digital technology for training, research on organisational implementation and usage is lacking, indicating a low uptake. This article presents a cross-border R&D effort to facilitate the digitalisation of crisis management training by developing generic virtual tabletop exercises (VTTXs) to be shared via a repository, and (re-)used in, and adapted for, diverse contexts. The purpose of this article is to identify essential aspects in designing and conducting virtual tabletop exercises (VTTXs) for collaborative crisis management training

Using Shared Procedural Knowledge for Virtual Collaboration Support in Emergency Management

This paper describes a framework that allows the collaborative development and deployment of procedural knowledge for task support in emergency situations. In this framework, procedural knowledge is represented in a wiki using an informal, textual description that is marked up with formal tags based on the <I-N-C-A> representation for hierarchical task networks used in AI planning. Procedural knowledge in the wiki can be used for task support by way of enhanced browsing facilities and the planning capabilities of an HTN planner. The latter supports the automatic composition of procedures to form plans for specific tasks. The tight integration of collaborative editing with deployment is new in this system and advances knowledge engineering for planning domain knowledge, that is, procedural knowledge. An experimental evaluation has shown that the explicit availability of procedural knowledge in emergency situations can reduce procedural uncertainty

Computerized System to Enhance Situation Awareness: Key Challenges Associated with the Design, Evaluation, and Extension of a Prototype

ABSTRACT Successful decision making and task execution in emergency management require appropriate levels of situation awareness (SA). This paper proposes an ontology-based model for the design of a computer-based system, Situation Aware Vigilant Emergency Reasoner (SAVER) that supports the individual, shared and team SA of managers in emergency situations. SAVER is evaluated in simulated experiments that demonstrate the improvements in SA performance. The paper provides a complete description of the SAVER design, implementation, evaluation and its proposed extension from a proof-of-concept to a production environment

Proceedings of the 2nd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects

These are the Proceedings of the 2nd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects. Objects that we use in our everyday life are expanding their restricted interaction capabilities and provide functionalities that go far beyond their original functionality. They feature computing capabilities and are thus able to capture information, process and store it and interact with their environments, turning them into smart objects

Case-Based Decision Support for Disaster Management

Disasters are characterized by severe disruptions of the society’s functionality and adverse impacts on humans, the environment, and economy that cannot be coped with by society using its own resources. This work presents a decision support method that identifies appropriate measures for protecting the public in the course of a nuclear accident. The method particularly considers the issue of uncertainty in decision-making as well as the structured integration of experience and expert knowledge

The uses of smart phones and their sociopolitical implications on Egyptian society

Socio-political awareness of a nation is the cornerstone for building well informed citizens that are the heart of any societal development and progress. This study examined the various uses of smart phones mobiles and their sociopolitical implications on the Egyptian Society from the January 25th revolution to the present. The research explores the impact of the mobile smart phones’ usage on changing the reality of the Egyptian society. The primary research linked the uses and gratification theory and the Apparategeist theory to the Egyptians’ civic engagement attitudes and political participation in the real world. Findings of the study show that accessing and acquiring knowledge through mobile smart phones is the main use of smart phones mobiles by Egyptian media experts and youths during the January 25th revolution, followed by June 30th and up-to-date. Based on the results of this study, smart phones’ usage for “surveillance” and being a source of information and dissemination of news is the main pillar for creating a well-informed Egyptian citizen who can transform the social and political face of the Egyptian society. The testimonies also show that the most used news websites by respondents are Youm 7, CNN, BBC and AL Arabyia. By being civically and politically engaged through smart phones’ usage, Egyptians are becoming active key players in sustaining and nourishing the democratic process. The findings also illustrated other uses of smart phones, however not as significant as being a source of accessing and acquiring news. The study uses a quantitative survey methodology in exploring the uses of smart phones and their sociopolitical implications before and after the revolution. It also observes the relationship between the usage and being civically and politically engaged in real life behaviors and or attitudes. Two primary surveys were conducted among two different samples. The first was a purposive sample of Egyptian elite media experts ( 50 participants) whom are civically engaged and actively involved in the Egyptian revolution phase and the second was a stratified sample of elite university students ( 200 participants). The research employed the two questionnaires to examine the relationship between smart phones’ usage and civic engagement attitudes of Egyptians in real life. The study proceeded with conducting a comparison between Egyptian media experts’ perspective of smart phones’ usage and the revolution and that of the Egyptian youth

Exploring the geographic uncertainty associated with crowdsourced crisis information: a geovisualisation approach

New information and communications technologies, such as mobile phones and social media, have presented the humanitarian community with a dilemma: how should humanitarian organisations integrate information from crisis-affected communities into their decision-making processes whilst guarding against inaccurate information from untrustworthy sources? Advocates of crisis mapping claim that, under certain circumstances, crowdsourcing can increase the accuracy of crisis information. However, whilst previous research has studied the geography of crisis information, the motivations of people who create crisis map mashups, and the motivations of people who crowdsource crisis information, the geography of, and the uncertainty associated with, crowdsourced crisis information has been ignored. As such, the current research is motivated by the desire to explore the geographic uncertainty associated with, and to contribute a better understanding of, crowdsourced crisis information. The current research contributes to the fields of GISc (Geographic Information Science) and crisis informatics; crisis mapping; and geovisualisation specifically and information visualisation more generally. These contributions can be summarised as an approach to, and an understanding of, the geographic uncertainty associated with crowdsourced crisis information; three geovisualisation software prototypes that can be used to identify meaningful patterns in crisis information; and the design, analysis, and evaluation model, which situates the activities associated with designing a software artefact-and using it to undertake analysis-within an evaluative framework. The approach to the geographic uncertainty associated with crowdsourced crisis information synthesised techniques from GISc, geovisualisation, and natural language processing. By following this approach, it was found that location descriptions from the Haiti crisis map did not 'fit' an existing conceptual model, and, consequently, that there is a need for new or enhanced georeferencing methods that attempt to estimate the uncertainty associated with free-text location descriptions from sources of crowdsourced crisis information