Disaster Information, Resilience, for Emergency and Crisis Technologies (DIRECT)

Description

The main objective of this minitrack is to focus on how technologies, information management, data sciences and artificial intelligence can contribute to support the role of governments and emergency management of public value purpose. This topic stems from the following considerations.

The evolution and progress of our civilizations have brought our world into a state of hyper-connection, hyper-density and hyper-concentration which has, little by little, completely erased all the spaces of physical, organizational or structural absorption. Yet, these spaces were likely to limit the expansion of critical situations, thus preventing the number, the amplitude and the repercussions of crises. This statement of fact and the responsibility it highlights, not necessarily for humans but at least for the development of the human species, with respect to the frequency, gravity and propagation of the crises that affect our planet, reciprocally underlines the need for our species to take charge of managing these crises. It is therefore fundamentally on all the questions relating to the handling of these missions by the governance structures (whether they are global, continental, national, regional or local) that this DIRECT minitrack wishes to address: The serious challenges facing government in cities, regions and nations of the world relate to acute shocks (e.g. forest fires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics and terrorist attacks) and chronic stresses (e.g. high unemployment, religious extremism, inefficient public transport, endemic violence, chronic shortages of food and water).

Information is among the key life-supporting essentials in a disaster response, as well as water and basic foods which are vital to sustain lives. Above all, the recent pandemics, environmental changes, geopolitical tensions have shown how information (about contamination, about root causes, about trust, about stocks, about science and progress) could be at the heart of the crisis management. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has, and will continue to profoundly change, disaster management in years to come. This, coupled with the impressive recent advances in artificial intelligence, offers huge potential for better management of crisis situations. Data and information management also guides us to build a disaster-resilient community which can adapt the society to those unexpected events. These issues should be tackled at each level of the governance (international, national, regional, local, etc.), and with regards to all relevant dimensions (social, technological, interoperability, agility, etc.).

We invite papers that deal with any aspect of the analysis, design, development, deployment, implementation, integration, operation, use or evaluation of ICT for crisis management, and resilient communities, especially in the perspective of discussing the roles of government and governance structures. Papers may address any phase in the disaster management cycle: Prevention and mitigation; preparedness; alert; response; recovery; and post disaster. In addition, we support innovative and break-through visions regarding these topics.

Topics of Interests

• Government’s disaster preparedness – disaster management plan, business continuity plan
• Role, evolution and perspectives of governance structures for better crisis management
• Crisis management for all stages – preparation, prevention, response and recovery
• Early warning systems and situational awareness among key stakeholders
• Social media and Citizen/Volunteers engagement to disaster responses
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) based content management, disaster mapping and Crisis informatics
• Real-time data analysis for government’s decision making
• Vertical management of information (from very local to the highest governmental level)
• International disaster response collaborations including government organizations
• Disaster communications with government organizations
• Disaster data recovery regarding public information
• Functional and technological expectations for crisis management inside governmental organizations
• Government’s role in resilient communities
• Human Centered Sensing for collaboration and communication
• Privacy, security and ethical issues in crisis and emergency management
• Pattern recognition, triage and prioritization of assistance
• Case studies; theory and practice
• Advances in crisis management methods and practice
• Security and safety models for emergency management systems
• eHealth for disasters and emergencies
• Drones for disaster response and management and Disaster robotics
• Computational simulation of crisis situations
• Mobile ad-hoc networks for emergencies
• Ground security / homeland security
• Antifragility of systems and territories
• Decision making in uncertain and instable environments
• Standardization and interoperability issues in disaster management from an eGov perspective
• Resilience of socio-technic systems, critical infrastructure and network of infrastructures
• Emerging paradigms for disaster management
• Disinformation, misinformation, and fake news in (social) media and institutions

Minitrack Leaders

Andrea H. Tapia is a full Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Dr. Tapia is a scholar of Crisis Informatics. She studies information discovery, needs, use and sharing in disaster settings. She also develops and studies information analysis tools, information devices and services in disaster settings. Dr. Tapia seeks to develop information and communication technology solutions that promote better decision-making across all responders.  Dr. Tapia’s most recent work focuses on making data generated by individuals or social networks via mobile information technologies useful to decision-makers within large institutions. 

Elsa Negre received her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences in 2009 from Université François-Rabelais de Tours, France. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO), Canada in 2010-2011, then at Laboratoire d'Informatique Nantes-Atlantique (LINA), France in 2011. She is currently an Associate Professor at Université Paris-Dauphine, France.  Her research interests include recommender systems, similarity measures, information systems and knowledge management, data warehousing and social network analysis, smart cities, early warning systems and crisis management. Dr. Negre authored and co-authored more than 50 publications in refereed journals and conferences.

Frederick Benaben is a full Professor in Artificial Intelligence for Crisis Management at IMT Mines Albi, France, Adjunct Professor at ISyE Georgia Tech, USA, Adjunct Professor at SEM Beijing JiaoTong University, China. He is the head of the research axis “Security and Crisis Management” and of the thematic group “Model-Driven Engineering”, Co-Director with Professor Benoit Montreuil of the international associated laboratory “Sentient Immersive Response Network” (SIReN Lab), between IMT Mines Albi and Georgia Tech. He received a M. Engineering (1998), a M. Sc. (1998), a PhD in Computer Sciences (2001). His research activities concern: immersive technologies for managing crisis situation. This research is based on artificial intelligence and model-driven engineering. He is the instigator and coordinator of the R-IOSuite software platform for crisis management. During the last 15 years, he published 30+ articles in International Journals and 180+ conference articles. He has supervised or directed 30 PhD. He has been PI or co-PI of 15+ collaborative funded projects (European/French) and is in charge of 3 industrial common labs.

Julie Dugdale is part of the STEAMER (Spatio-temporal information, adaptability, multimedia and knowledge representation) research team, which is part of the Informatics Lab of Grenoble. She is also an Associate Professor at Université Grenoble-Alpes, France. Dr. Dugdale was also a former President of the ISCRAM Association (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management). She is interested in modeling aspects of human behavior at the cognitive, work and societal level using an agent-based approach. Broadly, her work falls into the domain of Agent based Social Simulation (ABSS). Following her background in artificial intelligence, Dr. Dugdale is primarily interested in cognition and interaction. Specifically, modeling the cognitive activities of human behavior, the cognitive supports in our work environment and how groups of people interact in order to accomplish a task. Dr. Dugdale is particularly interested in emergency rescue and crisis management and has worked at simulating human behavior in crises such as earthquakes, bushfires and flash floods.

Mihoko Sakurai is Associate Professor at International University of Japan, Center for Global Communications. Her academic background is Information Systems and Policy Design. She received her PhD from the Keio University’s Graduate School of Media and Governance in Japan. She has studied effective ways of using Information Communication Technology in Japan’s municipal governments. After the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, she conducted field research and designed information systems to enhance the handling of future and unexpected disasters, especially for municipalities, which have to deliver disaster relief operations to their residents. Currently she is working on the notion of resilience and how information systems can support this. Her works related to the earthquake won the Best paper award at ITU Kaleidoscope conference (2013) and HICSS (2016). Her work has been published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, European Journal of Information Systems, IEEE Communications Magazine, International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Sustainable Cities and Society and in the proceedings of the leading international conferences.