eStorys: A visual storyboard system supporting back-channel communication for emergencies

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Journal of Visual Languages & Computing. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, and the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic University. Many pieces of information are currently available on the web that can be useful for emergency purposes and range from messages on forums and blogs to georeferenced photos. We present here a system that, by mixing information available on the web, is able to help both people and emergency professionals in rapidly obtaining data on emergency situations by using multiple web channels. In this paper we introduce a visual system, providing a combination of tools that demonstrated to be effective in such emergency situations, such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools, and storyboards. We demonstrated the efficacy of our system by means of an analytic evaluation (comparing it with others available on the web), an usability evaluation made by expert users (students adequately trained) and an experimental evaluation with 34 participants.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Banco Santander

The simulation of urban-scale evacuation scenarios with application to the Swinley forest fire

Forest fires are an annual occurrence in many parts of the world forcing large-scale evacuation. The frequent and growing occurrence of these events makes it necessary to develop appropriate evacuation plans for areas that are susceptible to forest fires. The buildingEXODUS evacuation model has been extended to model large-scale urban evacuations by including the road network and open spaces (e.g. parks, green spaces and town squares) along with buildings. The evacuation simulation results have been coupled with the results of a forest fire spread model and applied to the Swinley forest fire which occurred in Berkshire, UK in May 2011. Four evacuation procedures differing in the routes taken by the pedestrians were evaluated providing key evacuation statistics such as time to reach the assembly location, the distance travelled, congestion experienced by the agents and the safety margins associated with using each evacuation route. A key finding of this work is the importance of formulating evacuation procedures that identifies the threatened population, provides timely evacuation notice, identifies appropriate routes that maintains a safe distance from the hazard front thereby maximising safety margins even at the cost of taking longer evacuation routes. Evacuation simulation offers a means of achieving these goals

Technology: bringing solutions or disruptions?

Most of our discussions still focus on how responding organisations can use technology more effectively, rather than how disaster-affected communities might use those same technologies