The Global Katrina Effect - Deadline Extended for Paper Submissions!

I just found out that the deadline for papers has been extended to Friday, June 20, 2014. This is a great opportunity to submit papers you have been working whether you are in academia or are a practitioner.

"Since the goal of the symposium is to advance new ways of understanding the impact of Hurricane Katrina through a cross-national comparative examination of case studies,  proposals should adhere to the following structure: 1)  highlighting what happened during Hurricane Katrina regarding a specific subject area; 2) reviewing changes in institutions, procedures or law in the United States as a result of lessons learned from Katrina in this sector and 3) identifying how other countries adapted their emergency management systems/policies post-Katrina and whether these innovative changes might be utilized by the US and other countries.  Interdisciplinary studies are particularly encouraged."

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Global Katrina Effect: An International Research SymposiumCenter for Disaster Research & Education

Millersville University of Pennsylvania, USA

October 1 – 3, 2014

August 2015 will mark the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, considered to be one of the defining historic events within the emergency management field in the United States.  Accordingly, this anniversary will prompt numerous reflective academic assessments of how this disaster, which struck the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coasts, changed the US emergency management landscape thereafter. Less known, however, is the impact that Hurricane Katrina had on disaster management systems in other countries --over a variety of subject areas ranging from emergency preparedness to coastal management to vulnerable populations to companion animals. To highlight the global lessons drawn from Hurricane Katrina, Millersville University will host an international research symposium on October 1-3, 2014 which will bring together policymakers, practitioners and academics from around the world.  This interdisciplinary gathering will take place over a three-day period during which juried scholarly papers will address how other countries modified their disaster response institutions, practices or policies after the initial American mismanagement of the Katrina crisis came to light.

via Millersville University - Center for Disaster Research & Education.

Really, What is Situation Awareness?

We talk about situation awareness a lot. In fact, it permeates a lot of our central assumptions and decisions.  It also impacts how we strategize about our operations and planning, especially as it relates to information management. So really, what is situation awareness?  How does it relate to information management?

Situation awareness is the primary conceptual tool that disaster personnel use to manage all the information that disasters create. Endsley (1988) describes situation awareness as “the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future.” According to Endsley (2000), situation awareness is a distinct stage from decision making and the subsequent performance of actions. Endsley (1995, 2000) defines three levels of situation awareness leading to decision making and the performance of actions:

• Level 1 – Perception of current situation,
• Level 2 – Comprehension of current situation, and
• Level 3 – Projection of future status.

Harrald and Jefferson (2007) add that in emergency management, data interoperability leads to a common operating picture, which then leads to situation awareness. These concepts are intricately linked and build off one another. Endsley (2000) points out that situation awareness “is a state of knowledge about a dynamic environment. This is different than the processes used to achieve that knowledge.”

As situation awareness is achieved, though, employing a decision aid such as John Boyd's OODA loop helps decision makers make the right decisions. Originally developed for military application, the OODA loop has application across a wide range of situations.  It has four central components: 1) Observe, 2) Orient, 3) Decide, 4) Act.

So if our goal is to achieve good situation awareness so we can make better decisions, where do we begin?

Researchers such as King (2005) focus on how knowledge management concepts can be used to categorize disaster information needs of decision makers. Knowledge management has close ties to situation awareness as they both deal with the effective use of information. However, situation awareness uses knowledge management concepts to inform decision makers specifically in highly dynamic and mission critical environments. According to the King (2005), “[k]nowledge management is the systematic process and strategy for finding, capturing, organizing, distilling and presenting data, information, and knowledge for a specific purpose and to serve a specific organization or community.”  He bases his categorization on the needs of decision makers as a whole and finds there are four different types of knowledge types that decision makers seek out:

1. Situational
2. Background
3. Operational
4. Analytical

This categorization is quite high level, though, and does not fully address the range of decision making information needs. In addition, the ability to find, capture, organize, distill and present data, information and knowledge is quite challenging in practice. King (2005) points out the challenges organizations face:

“Information is constantly changing, comes from a multitude of sources and is often incomplete or contradictory. In some cases, there is an overload of information and, in other cases, there are complete gaps in what we know. Collecting information is often difficult, if not impossible, because of inaccessibility to the affected areas due to natural hazards, insecurity or government restrictions.”

Zhang et al. (2002) adds:

“Relief agencies are slowly developing the infrastructure to undertake effective information and knowledge management. A huge amount of information is collected but not efficiently used. Despite advanced technology achievements, many decision are still taken in emergencies with little information beyond that in people’s heads.”

Information management is inherently complex. Overcoming this complexity is a key challenge for our future as more and more information becomes available, especially in real-time.  So what approach will yield the greatest effort-to-outcome ratio in improving information management?  I think the we still have a ways to go on this, but simply categorizing and typing all available information is also impractical, costly, and causes strategists and technologists to lose focus on important and high value contributions.

So what are your thoughts on situation awareness? Does this jive with your interpretation? What are the challenges you face in practice?

Real-time Social Analytics for Disaster Response and Emergency Management

I had the great pleasure of meeting the SocialAI team in February when they demonstrated their social analytics tool for disaster management to a key audience of practitioners and technology enthusiasts. The team comes from the well-known Georgia Tech Research Institute and are participating in the Humanitarian Technology: Science, Systems, and Global Impact Conference taking place this May 13-15 in Boston, MA. If you are interesting in the subject of humanitarian technology and happen to be in the area, I highly recommend that you attend to check out SocialAI and the host of other tools working in this arena. Their exhibit is titled: Real-time Social Analytics for Disaster Response & Emergency Management.

The analysis they are doing related to social media in disaster management is quite remarkable. But they have a big mission ahead of them as they attempt to make social network theory and social media analysis relevant for practitioners.  This is a near universal problem this industry faces and SocialAI is one of the key players making progress in the area.

Check out more about their research as well as the team on their website.  As they develop the system more, I know they will be looking for more practitioner feedback.  This is a vital component of the system and it won't be as effective as it could be with your support.

Also, what thoughts do you have on the system?  What kinds of social network information do you seek in your operations?

Social Media and Situational Awareness at a Joint Interagency Field Exploration

This article was first published in the April issue of the IAEM Bulletin and highlighted lessons learned from a Joint Interagency Field Exploration that put technologists and decision makers in the same room to achieve new possibilities.  Mary Jo Flynn was the 1st author.  I supported this article as a 2nd author.  We both participated in the event.  

High impact and high visibility disasters have increasingly revealed the proliferation and widespread use of mobile devices, social media, photos, videos, and other sensory data and channels as information sources. This information can be helpful in planning for, responding to, and recovering from disasters and emergencies. The amount and speed of available information, however, in addition to a lack in ability to identify, verify, aggregate, coordinate, and contextualize information gleaned from social media, leaves data often unused and un-actionable.

The JIFX

To address technology gaps across a variety of disciplines, including information sharing, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, in partnership with the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Naval Postgraduate School, hosts the Joint Interagency Field Exploration (JIFX). Each quarter, JIFX participants utilize different methods of interaction, all of which focus on end user input, which reflects and address the most complex challenges identified by those directly engaged in homeland defense and security. JIFX 2014-2, held at Camp Roberts, Ca., February 10-13, offered participants an opportunity to participate in an experiment looking at the usefulness of social media and data to address agency mission objectives and pre-existing information requirements to achieve enhanced situational awareness and decision support.

Participants

Members of the DHS Virtual Social Media Working Group, including individuals from Anaheim [Ca.] Emergency Management, San Francisco Department of Emergency Management, Johnson County [Ks.] Sheriff, New York City Office of Emergency Management, George Washington University, Wright State University, Humanity Road, U.S. Health and Human Services, U.S. Northern Command, the National Guard, and many others participated in a three day event to test how useful information gleaned from social media sources could have been during Hurricane Sandy, if it had been easily available. Several technology companies participated as well, offering their tools for the purposes of testing how to identify, leverage, integrate, and visualize social media and other types of data within an operational environment.

Scenario

The scenario was based on factual data identified from actual events in Hurricane Sandy, and included several “moves” that spanned the pre-event, onset and response, and recovery phases of the incident and included weather conditions, storm effects on Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources (CIKR), ongoing response efforts, population actions, and social media. Participants and technologists worked together to identify what type of information, if any, could be leveraged from additional sources to inform emergency response decision-making during the event. The group focused on specific information needs from within these various areas, specifically focusing on mission requirements, applicable keywords, potential thresholds to assist with prioritization of available information, the essential elements of the information needed including technical specifics (e.g. detail, format,  update frequency, visualization method, etc.).

As the exercise played out, participants concluded that the data available, which had been stripped of personally identifiable information (PII), was not detailed enough to produce a clear picture of events as they unfolded. Difficulties arose as well, in the discussions between the technologists and the participants (end users) regarding the specific objectives, requirements, and applications of the available technologies. It became apparent that there was a significant disconnect in concept, meaning, and terminology that must be addressed in order to support future technology development.  

Since the exercise plan was already built around a storm scenario, the group decided to switch to a live event, the Nor’easter poised to hit Atlanta, Georgia and the East Coast, on February 12 and 13. The exercise was modified to allow all technologists to perform work in teams while subject matter experts provided information on data needs for decision making and appropriate visualizations.  Subject matter experts provided a real-world link to actual impacted communities through Humanity Road, which officially activated to support response to the event, and other connections established during the exercise.

Lessons Learned

The transition to a live scenario proved informative as technologists attempted to adjust their solutions to the needs of emergency managers in real-time.  One key finding was that technologies need focus on 1) anomaly and change detection and then 2) enable the decision maker to inquire further about other potential impacts or why such a change or event is taking place.  Another key finding was that while automated search may help to build situational awareness, full accounts are still best made by the experts who can contextualize information better and faster than information systems.  Despite decisions still being held by an individual, the technologies at the JIFX provided significantly greater insight into the awareness of the situation when integrated with other data sources and technologies.

Participants identified several additional lessons learned, including:

• The need to identify information requirements, both individually, and in “packages” (e.g. groups of information that, together, satisfy various questions). there is a need for better categorization and discoverability of available data to ensure potential resources are identified prior to an event;
• Mission objectives must be pre-identified and defined to align with technical requirements to ensure technology is leveraged effectively.
• Establishment of baseline monitoring capabilities will be useful in determining the occurrence of events, or anomaly detection.
• While automation of analysis will help in minimizing the time required to identify useful information, manual input and/or consideration will help to ensure the veracity and applicability of found information.
• Definition of relationships between multiple information sources, including cascading effects and additional information requirements, will assist in further contextualizing information as it relates to the operational environment at hand.
• Due to the volume of data available, filtering queries as defined by pre-existing mission and information objectives may prove more useful than filtering all results.

Conclusion

The shift from scenario to live event clearly demonstrated a need for real-time analysis of technologies to accurately determine the usefulness of tools. Additionally, the removal of all PII presented a challenge to government agencies needing crucial life-saving information; additional consideration is necessary in order to best identify how to move forward in trend analysis, ensuring information that is accessible, whether limited by various policies and legal considerations, is used efficiently and effectively.

Public Safety Practitioners Needed for Hackathon...Tech Skills NOT Required

I just came across a fairly well-funded and notable hackathon taking place in Washington, DC May 2-3.  The event is looking for public safety practitioners to help guide development.  No technical knowledge or skills are required, just an interest in furthering mobile application development in public safety.  This is a great event for first timers to get their feet wet in this domain and network with other people and organizations.

Sponsors and participants include a range of people from Google, AT&T, Apperian, McAfee, the Department of Homeland Security and many others.  Here is the intro:

Building on commercially available software, leveraging APIs from AT&T, Apperian, Google, and McAfee and engineering support from these tech powerhouses, you’ll be able to work with some of America’s finest with actual police, fire, and EMS communications experts on hand from the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO) to help you conceptualize solutions and work through some of these unique and exciting Public Safety challenges. Additionally, you will have application security experts from Department of Homeland Security assisting you to enhance the function, performance, and security of your application that is critical to public safety.

Teams can win up to $10,000 centered around four main challenges:

1) Communications: Mobile communications are essential to public safety. Interoperable voice, video, and information sharing between all personnel, which often includes responders from different disciplines and jurisdictions would dramatically enhance response efficiency and safety. Communication must be convenient and reliable. The right person having the right access at the right time to sensitive information is essential. How can your creation provide seamless and straightforward communications capabilities for public safety?

2) Situational Awareness: Public safety users must be aware of their surroundings and access to the most up-to-date information in order to make the best real-time, tactical decisions. However, too much information can inhibit decision-making. Reducing distractions and focusing on the outputs of data analysis can help the first responder react appropriately in a high-stress, disorderly environment. How can your creation provide data to the first responder to quickly identify relevant and actionable information about their situation or environment?

3) Augmented Reality: First responders can benefit from an enhanced view of the environment while in the field. This view may be supplemented by interactive map overlays, multi-user awareness, virtual browsing, and/or virtual showcasing. For instance, a tool could give these professionals information that would not otherwise be visible (example: “seeing” other responders, electrical wires, stand pipes, through obstructions) could be valuable for emergency response and first responder safety. How can your creation help to provide an augmented reality experience for the user?

4) APCO Location Challenge: Option 1 - The existing 9-1-1 network has been designed to automatically identify a mobile 9-1-1 caller’s location however, on occasion the location information of a mobile 911 caller is not accurate or not sent in a timely manner to the Public Safety Answer Point (911 Call Center). How can your application assist Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP) receive accurate and timely information so they can better respond to emergency calls?

Option 2 - Emergency responders live in an inherently mobile environment – but their work is often done in collaboration. Thus location of first responder assets is critical to any emergency operation. To that end, how can your application help provide location-based information to a first responder in the field about his/her location, the location of others in their cohort, and give permissioned access about that information to their command (i.e. PSAP)?

For more information and to register, check out the event website.

Attend the Best Conference for Information Systems in Disaster Management

During May 18-21, 2014, Penn State University will be hosting the 11th annual Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) Conference.  ISCRAM is an international community promoting research and development, exchange of knowledge and deployment of information systems in the field of crisis management.  The May conference is expecting to draw approximately 300 attendees.

You are encouraged to engage the expert panelists on the following four topics.

1. Super Typhoon Haiyan: the Information Management Disaster?
2. Crowdsourcing Crisis Response: The Boston Marathon Bombing
3. Doing IT Right: Ethical, Legal and Social Issues of IT Supported Emergency Response
4. Creating a Common Operational Picture (COP) with the Crowd

At last year’s ISCRAM conference, the headline topics were holistic crisis management as well as the need to close the gap between scientists and the practitioners.  It is envisioned that ISCRAM 2014 will advance these discussions as the organization positions itself to take a leadership role to reframe information systems for emergency response and crisis management scenarios.