Information and communication technology (ICT) promises to help reduce impacts of large-scale disruptions from natural hazards, pandemics, and terrorist threat. This research focuses on a critical aspect of large-scale emergency response -- the needs and roles of members of the public. By viewing the citizenry as a powerful, self-organizing, and collectively intelligent force, ICT can play a transformational role in crisis situations. This view of a civil society augmented by ICT is based on socio-behavioral knowledge about how people behave in crisis, rather than on simplified and mythical portrayals. With a critical reframing of emergency response as a socially-distributed information system, the project aims to leverage the knowledge of members of the public through reuse of publicly available computer mediated communications (CMCs) (e.g., community, mapping, and social networking sites; blogs; Twitter). The project will study and integrate that heterogeneous information and -- with techniques of information extraction through natural language processing as well as trust and reputation modeling -- add meta-information to help users assess context, validity, source, credibility, and timeliness to make the best decisions for their highly localized, changing conditions.
The results of this research addresses matters of policy, practice and technological innovation, responding directly to needs identified in national policy statements, including Grand Challenge #1 of the National Science and Technology Council's Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction, which calls for the provision of "hazard and disaster information where and when it is needed" (SDR, 2005). At-risk populations are disproportionately affected by crises; the results of this research could mitigate the impacts on these communities. The research is also inclusive of people across different cultures/ethnic groups within the U.S. and from different countries. The project broadens the future STEM workforce, since socio-technical and practical orientations to computational research attract women to study STEM disciplines. The research contributions include cyberinfrastructure-aware applications, techniques, and services built from empirical knowledge of the social structures that produce crisis data.
