Design Principles for Emergency Collaborative Systems: A Situation Awareness Study of Buffalo Plane Crash

Due to differences in governance structure, training, applicable polices, legal requirements and culture, the nature of operations vary based on agency, county, population, leadership, etc. This leads to serious challenges during multi-agency response to emergencies. The different agencies are required to work together to effectively and efficiently respond to an emergency incident. The paper contributes to research in areas of inter-agency collaboration and emergency management. With the help of case study, this paper aims to explore factors that impact inter-agency collaboration to generate design principles that are useful to designing better systems to mitigate critical incidents. In addition, with the help of interviews with four experts (two fire chiefs and two dispatchers) and raw incident communication reports, we identify system, communication, information, and interoperability issues

An Activity Theory Approach to Modeling Dispatch-Mediated Emergency Response

Emergency response involves multiple local, state, and federal communities of responders. These communities are supported by emergency dispatch agencies that share digital traces of task-critical information. However, the communities of responders often comprise an informal network of people and lack structured mechanisms of information sharing. To standardize the exchange of task-critical information in communities of responders, we develop a conceptual modeling grammar. We base the grammar on an activity-theory perspective and ground it in an analysis of emergency dispatch incident reports. The paper contributes to research in dispatch-mediated emergency response literature by (1) developing a framework of elements and relationships to support critical information flow within emergency communities of responders, (2) developing a conceptual modeling grammar for modeling emergency tasks in dispatch-mediated emergency response, and (3) implementing a prototype system to demonstrate the utility of the conceptual modeling grammar

Response to the Office of Personnel Management Data Breaches: A Conceptual Exploration

The existing literature has been silent on individuals’ decision making and reactions in response to data breaches. In 2015, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) discovered that data of several million Federal employee was stolen in cyber-attacks. Within the context of the OPM breaches, we propose a conceptual model that helps reveal the core decision making process of incident victims in responding to the OPM breach. We also explore the key decision factors including data breach fatigue. Expected findings of study will explain the individual differences in post-breach actions. Further, the study may offer directions to the practitioners and policy makers in conceiving tactics and strategies that promote data breach protections in the aftermath of data breach incidents despite challenges such as fatigue. This research has been funded by NSF under grant 1554373 and grant 1554480. The usual disclaimer applies