Disaster Information, Technology, and Resilience in Digital Government

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    A Tentative Framework for Risk and Opportunity Detection in A Collaborative Environment Based on Data Interpretation
    ( 2019-01-08) Benaben, Frederick ; Li, Jiayao ; Koura, Ibrahim ; Montreuil, Benoit ; Lauras, Matthieu ; Mu, Wenxin ; Gou, Juanqiong
    This article deals with the question of risk and opportunity identification based on data management as one main step of the convergence of artificial intelligence and industrial engineering. Two main subjects are addressed in this article: (i) the data management framework that could be the backbone for the whole approach, and (ii) the modeling theoretical background that could be used as a basement for the definition of a formal system for risk and opportunity modeling. The general principles presented in the article are used to define outlooks and to organize them as milestone of a roadmap.
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    Understanding resistance to resilience in coastal hazards and climate adaptation: three approaches to visualizing structural and process obstacles, opportunities and adaptation responses
    ( 2019-01-08) Robadue Jr., Donald
    The US state of Rhode Island (RI) offers a unique case for examining the conditions that hinder or facilitate coastal resilience efforts, due to its small size, active coastal program, and dynamic engagement of stakeholders. A five-decade corpus of information on hazard events, studies, plans and policies, and database of more than 40,000 Rl Coastal Resource Management Council (CRMC) permit decisions helps reveal patterns of decision-maing related to coastal resilience. A social network map traces Rl stakeholder engagement revealing hidden areas of resistance resilience policies. Content analysis of documents and press coverage of decision-making in just one critical coastal area reveals 71 types of obstacles articulated by property owners and authorities. Current RI plans and studies are biased toward public engagement, filling information gaps, and designing new adaptation options. Deeper structural, financial and institutional sources of resistance to resilience remain and continue to be difficult to address.
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    Application of Image Analytics for Disaster Response in Smart Cities
    ( 2019-01-08) Chaudhuri, Neha ; Bose, Indranil
    Post-disaster, city planners need to effectively plan response activities and assign rescue teams to specific disaster zones quickly. We address the problem of lack of accurate information of the disaster zones and existence of human survivors in debris using image analytics from smart city data. Innovative usage of smart city infrastructure is proposed as a potential solution to this issue. We collected images from earthquake-hit smart urban environments and implemented a CNN model for classification of these images to identify human body parts out of the debris. TensorFlow backend (using Keras) was utilized for this classification. We were able to achieve 83.2% accuracy from our model. The novel application of image data from smart city infrastructure and the resultant findings from our model has significant implications for effective disaster response operations, especially in smart cities.
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    Information Sharing and Situational Awareness: Insights from the Cascadia Rising Exercise of June 2016
    ( 2019-01-08) Scholl, Hans Jochen ; Hubbell, Karyn ; Leonard, Jeffrey
    In a catastrophic incident gaining situational awareness (SA) is the foremost prerequisite that ena-bles responders to save and sustain lives, stabilize the incident, and protect the environment and property from further damage. However, catastrophes severely damage and disrupt critical infrastructures including response assets. Initially and for days and even weeks, essential information remains incomplete, unverified, and is changing as the catastrophic incident unfolds, all of which leads to a distorted common operating picture (COP). The lack of clear and comprehensive SA/COP prevents incident commanders from efficiently directing the response effort. This study reports on the challenges emergency responders faced with regard to situational awareness in a recent large-scale exercise under the name of Cascadia Rising 2016 (CR16) conducted in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The exercise involved a total of 23,000 active participants. Over four days in June of 2016, CR16 simulated the coordinated response to a rupture of the 800-mile Cascadia Subduction Zone resulting in a magnitude-9 earthquake and tsunami similar to the catastrophic incident in Eastern Japan in 2011. Responders at all levels were severely challenged, and the exercise revealed major vulnerabilities in critical infrastructures. Situational awareness was very difficult to establish. The exercise demonstrated that the challenges to SA/COP and to response management, in general, during catastrophic incidents cannot be regarded as a linear extension of non-catastrophic emergency and disaster responses. It rather requires the rethinking and revising of practices and procedures when responding under the constraints of massively degraded critical information infrastructures and harshly decimated assets.
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    Role Playing Next Generation 9-1-1: Sensemaking with Social Media in Public-Safety Answering Points
    ( 2019-01-08) Grace, Rob ; Kropczynski, Jess ; Tapia, Andrea ; Obeysekare, Eric ; Halse, Shane ; Coche, Julien ; Montarnal, Aurélie ; Beagles, Mike ; Fonseca, Fred
    For over a decade, research has suggested that social media can enhance the situational awareness of emergency responders during a crisis. Rarely, however, do studies examine the sensemaking processes of emergency responders by which situational awareness is achieved. We examine sensemaking in a Public-Safety Answering Point (PSAP) through role plays with 9-1-1 telecommunicators that imagine how social media analysts can contribute to sensemaking processes among 9-1-1 call takers, dispatchers, and emergency responders. These role plays suggest social media can address information gaps that emerge when 9-1-1 callers fail to provide critical information and vice versa, suggesting social media enhances situational awareness only when integrated into sensemaking processes that synthesize information across multiple, incomplete, but complementary data sources. This synthesis, however, requires cooperative information gathering and sharing among call takers, dispatchers, and social media analysts that PSAPs can coordinate using common interpretive frameworks and common information spaces.
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    From Declarative Knowledge to Process-based Crisis Resolution: application to Flood Management
    ( 2019-01-08) Ariouat, Hanane ; Andonoff, Eric ; Hanachi, Chihab
    Crisis resolution is often based on official government plans that provide guidelines. In real time, when a crisis occurs, one or several plans have to be chosen, merged, refined to meet the specific requirements of the crisis, and then launched. Plans are often in a textual format, which makes their interpretation ambiguous and error prone. Therefore, in real time, the coordination of stakeholders becomes difficult and time consuming. Given these drawbacks, the transformation of a plan into a process provides several advantages: i) an accurate and machine-readable specification of coordination of actions to be done in the field, ii) a better common understanding between stakeholders responsible for these actions and iii) a mean to analyze, simulate and evaluate the crisis response before launching it. The problem being addressed in this paper is “how to deduce a process for driving crisis resolution from business knowledge (plans, stakeholders and their capacities) and relevant facts observed in the impacted field”. This paper presents first a meta-model for capturing business knowledge and crisis situation and then a deduction approach deriving a process in a BPMN-like format. Flood of the Loire in June 2016 serves as a support for approach experiment.
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    Inter-Organizational Collaboration, Information Flows, and the Use of Social Media During Disasters: A Focus on Vulnerable Communities
    ( 2019-01-08) Karanasios, Stan ; Cooper, Vanessa ; Balcell, Marta Poblet ; Hayes, Peter
    This study contributes to ongoing attempts by scholars to understand the many ways that social media is being used by disaster and crisis response actors. We present a case study consisting of emergency response organizations, government agencies, local government, non-government organizations, community groups and platform-based actors, and focus specifically on how social media is used in this context to support the information needs of vulnerable groups. We examine how tension between the presence of top-down, generic information and the need for contextualized and specific information is resolved, and the translation processes that occur between the range of actors. We also offer recommendations for future research to address the disproportionate impacts of disasters and crises on vulnerable groups.
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    e-Flooding: Crisis Management through Two Temporal Loops
    ( 2019-01-08) Stolf, Patricia ; Pierson, Jean-Marc ; Sayah, Amal ; Da Costa, Georges ; Renaud-Goud, Paul
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    Introduction to the Minitrack on Disaster Information, Technology, and Resilience in Digital Government
    ( 2019-01-08) Benaben, Frederick ; Sakurai, Mihoko ; Tapia, Andrea