10 research outputs found
Developing a Framework for Stigmergic Human Collaboration with Technology Tools: Cases in Emergency Response
Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), particularly social media and geographic information systems (GIS), have become a transformational force in emergency response. Social media enables ad hoc collaboration, providing timely, useful information dissemination and sharing, and helping to overcome limitations of time and place. Geographic information systems increase the level of situation awareness, serving geospatial data using interactive maps, animations, and computer generated imagery derived from sophisticated global remote sensing systems. Digital workspaces bring these technologies together and contribute to meeting ad hoc and formal emergency response challenges through their affordances of situation awareness and mass collaboration. Distributed ICTs that enable ad hoc emergency response via digital workspaces have arguably made traditional top-down system deployments less relevant in certain situations, including emergency response (Merrill, 2009; Heylighen, 2007a, b). Heylighen (2014, 2007a, b) theorizes that human cognitive stigmergy explains some self-organizing characteristics of ad hoc systems. Elliott (2007) identifies cognitive stigmergy as a factor in mass collaborations supported by digital workspaces. Stigmergy, a term from biology, refers to the phenomenon of self-organizing systems with agents that coordinate via perceived changes in the environment rather than direct communication. In the present research, ad hoc emergency response is examined through the lens of human cognitive stigmergy. The basic assertion is that ICTs and stigmergy together make possible highly effective ad hoc collaborations in circumstances where more typical collaborative methods break down. The research is organized into three essays: an in-depth analysis of the development and deployment of the Ushahidi emergency response software platform, a comparison of the emergency response ICTs used for emergency response during Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and a process model developed from the case studies and relevant academic literature is described
Rover-II: A Context-Aware Middleware for Pervasive Computing Environment
It is well recognized that context plays a significant role in all human endeavors. All decisions are based on information which has to be interpreted in context. By making information systems context-aware we can have systems that significantly enhance human capabilities to make critical decisions.
A major challenge of context-aware systems is to balance usability with generality and extensibility. The relevant context changes depending on the particular application. The model used to represent the context and its relationship to entities must be general
enough to allow additions of context categories without redesign while remaining usable across many applications. Also, while efforts are put in by application designers and developers to make applications context-aware, these efforts are customized to specific
needs of the target application, and only certain common contexts like location and time are taken into account. Therefore, a general framework is called for that can (i) efficiently maintain, represent and integrate contextual information, (ii) act as an integration platform
where different applications can share contexts and (iii) provide relevant services to make efficient use of the contextual information. This dissertation presents:
* a generic and effective context model - Rover Context Model (RoCoM) that is structured around four primitives: entities, events, relationships, and activities; and practically usable through the concept of templates,
* a flexible, extensible and generic ontology - Rover Context Model Ontology (RoCoMO) supporting the model, that addresses the shortcomings of existing ontologies,
* an effective mechanism of modeling the context of a situation, through the concept of relevant context, with the help of situation graph, efficiently handling and making best use of context information,
* a context middleware - Rover-II, which serves as a framework for contextual information integration, that could be used not just to store and compile the contextual information, but also integrate relevant services to enhance the context information; and more importantly, enable sharing of context among the applications subscribed
to it,
* the initial design and implementation of a distributed architecture for Rover-II, following a P2P arrangement inspired from Tapestry,
The above concepts are illustrated through M-Urgency, a context-aware public safety system that has been deployed at the University of Maryland Police Department
Recommended from our members
Supporting the Social Media Needs of Emergency Public Information Officers with Human-Centered Design and Development
Emergency response agencies, which operate as command-and-control organizations, push information to members of the public with too few mechanisms to support communication flowing back. Recently, information communication technologies (ICTs) such as social media have challenged this one-way model by allowing the public to participate in emergency response in new and unexpected ways. These developments place new pressure on emergency managers to release information over social media streams, monitor online activities during an emergency event, incorporate information provided by members of the public into response efforts, and engage in the public conversation around an event. Within US emergency response organizations, public information officers (PIOs) are in a unique position to use these emerging communication technologies. PIOs are responsible for communicating official response information to members of the public during an emergency event and ensuring that the information available in the public arena is accurate and complete. In this dissertation work, I examine how social media and the forms of public participation enabled by it are changing the role of the PIO. Based on this understanding, I explore ICT solutions for the PIO through human-centered methods that include the PIO in the design process. Finally, I design, implement, and evaluate a software application informed by this work that supports the social media needs of PIOs. With the aim of improving emergency response efforts, I demonstrate how empirically-based understandings of emergency management work can inform technology design, practice, and policy. This dissertation research provides the following contributions: (1) an examination of PIOs' roles and the sociotechnical environment in which they work; (2) a new model of PIO communication that takes into account new communication pathways that have been enabled by ICT; (3) a set of requirements for supporting PIO social media communication needs; (4) the design, implementation, and evaluation of a tool--the PIO Monitoring Application--that supports the social media monitoring, documenting, reporting, and organizing needs of PIOs during an emergency event; (5) a description of the likely future role of PIOs and how that role might be supported
Research Directions in Information Systems for Humanitarian Logistics
This article systematically reviews the literature on using IT (Information Technology) in humanitarian logistics focusing on disaster relief operations. We first discuss problems in humanitarian relief logistics. We then identify the stage and disaster type for each article as well as the article’s research methodology and research contribution. Finally, we identify potential future research directions
Integrated ZigBee RFID sensor networks for resource tracking and monitoring in logistics management
The Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which includes passive and active systems and is the hottest Auto-ID technology nowadays, and the wireless sensor network (WSN), which is one of the focusing topics on monitoring and control, are two fast-growing technologies that have shown great potential in future logistics management applications. However, an information system for logistics applications is always expected to answer four questions: Who, What, When and Where (4Ws), and neither of the two technologies is able to provide complete information for all of them. WSN aims to provide environment monitoring and control regarded as When and What , while RFID focuses on automatic identification of various objects and provides Who (ID). Most people usually think RFID can provide Where at all the time. But what normal passive RFID does is to tell us where an object was the last time it went through a reader, and normal active RFID only tells whether an object is presenting on site. This could sometimes be insufficient for certain applications that require more accurate location awareness, for which a system with real-time localization (RTLS), which is an extended concept of RFID, will be necessary to answer Where constantly. As WSN and various RFID technologies provide information for different but complementary parts of the 4Ws, a hybrid system that gives a complete answer by combining all of them could be promising in future logistics management applications. Unfortunately, in the last decade those technologies have been emerging and developing independently, with little research been done in how they could be integrated.
This thesis aims to develop a framework for the network level architecture design of such hybrid system for on-site resource management applications in logistics centres. The various architectures proposed in this thesis are designed to address different levels of requirements in the hierarchy of needs, from single integration to hybrid system with real-time localization. The contribution of this thesis consists of six parts. Firstly, two new concepts, Reader as a sensor and Tag as a sensor , which lead to RAS and TAS architectures respectively, for single integrations of RFID and WSN in various scenarios with existing systems; Secondly, a integrated ZigBee RFID Sensor Network Architecture for hybrid integration; Thirdly, a connectionless inventory tracking architecture (CITA) and its battery consumption model adding location awareness for inventory tracking in Hybrid ZigBee RFID Sensor Networks; Fourthly, a connectionless stochastic reference beacon architecture (COSBA) adding location awareness for high mobility target tracking in Hybrid ZigBee RFID Sensor Networks; Fifthly, improving connectionless stochastic beacon transmission performance with two proposed beacon transmission models, the Fully Stochastic Reference Beacon (FSRB) model and the Time Slot Based Stochastic Reference Beacon (TSSRB) model; Sixthly, case study of the proposed frameworks in Humanitarian Logistics Centres (HLCs).
The research in this thesis is based on ZigBee/IEEE802.15.4, which is currently the most widely used WSN technology. The proposed architectures are demonstrated through hardware implementation and lab tests, as well as mathematic derivation and Matlab simulations for their corresponding performance models. All the tests and simulations of my designs have verified feasibility and features of our designs compared with the traditional systems
Supporting Humanitarian Relief Logistics Operations through Online Geocollaborative Knowledge Management Brian M. Tomaszewski, Alan M. MacEachren, Scott Pezanowski, Xiaoyan Liu, and Ian Turton
Over the past two years, horrific disasters such as the Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the Pakistan Earthquake have demonstrated the critical need for effective technological infrastructure that is scientifically grounded in geo-visual group interaction theory [1] and humanitarian knowledge management procedures [2] to quickly and effectively facilitate planning for predictable events and post-event response. In this demonstration, we address specific issues that negatively impact the effectiveness of geocollaborative process in disaster relief. These include lack of common group operating picture, lack of command structure understanding and blatant miscommunication and misunderstanding about where relief supplies needed to be delivered, who will deliver them, when they need to be delivered, and the relevancy of deliveries to stricken areas. Our approach improves on existing systems by using methods and technologies that meet the challenges of coordinating the efforts of diverse and spatially distributed private, public, and governmental agencies throughout the world responding to disasters. This is accomplished by applying new forms of distributed geospatial data, technology, and collaboration functionality. We present our progress on the development of the Geocollaborative Web Portal (GWP), an asynchronous, open source geospatial information framework designed to support international group interaction and knowledge management in the context of humanitarian relief logistics