Providing real-time assistance in disaster relief by leveraging crowdsourcing power

Crowdsourcing platforms for disaster management have drawn a lot of attention in recent years due to their efficiency in disaster relief tasks, especially for disaster data collection and analysis. Although the on-site rescue staff can largely benefit from these crowdsourcing data, due to the rapidly evolving situation at the disaster site, they usually encounter various difficulties and have requests, which need to be resolved in a short time. In this paper, aiming at efficiently harnessing crowdsourcing power to provide those on-site rescue staff with real-time remote assistance, we design and develop a crowdsourcing disaster support platform by considering three unique features, viz., selecting and notifying relevant off-site users for individual request according to their expertise; providing collaborative working functionalities to off-site users; improving answer credibility via “crowd voting.” To evaluate the platform, we conducted a series of experiments with three-round user trials and also a System Usability Scale survey after each trial. The results show that the platform can effectively support on-site rescue staff by leveraging crowdsourcing power and achieve good usability

Was is empirische Ethik?

Definition of the problem Empirical ethics is a relatively new type of research, predominantly practiced in medical ethics. Arguments This article discusses the distinctive features of empirical ethics and makes a distinction between generalist and contextualist empirical ethics. After providing some examples of both types of empirical ethics, it discusses a weak spot in each of them. Conclusion The conclusion is that the emergence of empirical ethics as such is a positive development. Empirical ethics, however, should be regarded as a complement to 'traditional' philosophical medical ethics, and not as the better alternative. © Die Autor(en) 2009