Results of the project and artifacts

Expected research outcomes of this work include:

• a methodology for determining customization needs and for risk communications in adverse situations that incorporates societal implications of the communication
• systems and strategies for customization notification that supports accurate and rapid targeting of the most vulnerable populations
• techniques for flash dissemination in crisis contexts that enables delivery of urgent communications to large number of users in a very short period of time over unreliable networks
• techniques to support efficient use of scarce wireless resources to reach mobile recipients reachable over wireless devices.   

Our efforts are expected to culminate in two artifacts:

• a scalable rapid real-time alert system (School Crisis Alert System)
• a customized risk communications system capable of reaching diverse populations based on context and recipient characteristics. (Hurricane Portal)

School Crisis Alert System

The School Crisis Alert System is one of the artifacts that is being developed in the Rescue Dissemination Project. The goal of this artifact is to create an automated system to disseminate information to schools and other organization in case of crisis and disasters. The dissemination will be done by exploiting the organization's emergency plans by sending, for each event, the right information to the person that, according to the emergency plan, should received it. The existing emergency's plans are so improved by having updated, relevant and customized information easily available to the people who need them.
School Crisis Alert Website

Hurricane Portal

The RESCUE Hurricane Portal provides a means by which emergency response organizations and the general public can capture, process, and track the evolution of crises in real-time during hurricanes. The portal provides three major benefits. The portal provides simulation results for wind damage to buildings as well as emergency shelter needs prior to or immediately following landfall of the hurricane, which can be used for planning purposes and resource allocation. The portal also serves as a clearinghouse for eyewitness damage reports via a damage survey, which can be used to validate the simulated results. Finally, the portal provides a suite of sophisticated search, retrieval, and analysis tools for utilizing web content to provide situational awareness.

Research areas related to the hurricane portal include:

1. Entity & Event Extraction from text and other multimodal data to
   build situational awareness
2. Mechanisms to model reliability and trust in information
3. Doman specific ontologies to classify and reason about disasters
4. Models and simulations for loss estimation and disaster impact
   analysis
5. Geo-spatial analysis models for disaster planning and monitoring