This SGER project is in response to the Sumatra-Andaman Island earthquake and Indian Ocean tsunami disaster. The project will study the functioning of communication networks and their use by various social groups to better understand how sensor technologies could be best deployed and integrated into global communication networks. Such research is necessary to avoid what happened during this disaster where despite the fact that the tsunami hit land two hours before hitting India and Sri Lanka, no warning signal propagated to these regions. The proposed research will build models of how information flows in a communication network, taking into account the "trustability" of the information. The broader impacts of this research will speak to what went wrong and the provision of recommendations to avoid such a situation in the future. Under high stress conditions, where parts of a communication network may be destroyed or disrupted, the nature of social communication networks will change. The objective is to understand how they changed and how information flow relating to the disaster was affected. Ultimately, the goal is to provide concrete suggestions for how to improve social communication networks so as to allow warning messages to flow under situations of disruption and destruction.
