Emergency Response Matt Novinger Oct 1 2008 Background Crisis Informatics The study of Information and Communications Technology ICT before during and after a disaster How is it used how is it not used How do first responders make use of it to help victims and recovery How do the victims of disasters use ICT during and after a disaster and what are they not able to use CIMS Crisis Information Management Systems Iannella et al 2007 The RESCUE Disaster Portal for Disasters and Emergency Response Who is RESCUE What is this system Web based Developed in collaboration with city of Ontario CA Multiple semiautonomous components Lickfett et al 2008 Features Situation Summary Announcements Map annotations Shelter Information Family Reunification Donation Management Press Notifications from Disaster Portal Website from Disaster Portal Website from Disaster Portal Website from Disaster Portal Website from Disaster Portal Website from Disaster Portal Website Design Pluggable applications Shared across applications Crisis Alerting Takes a starting event matches it against a rule engine or policy engine Based on the output of the rule engine it formats a message for dissemination and chooses the recipients Messages can be sent over several mediums Can also send post disaster customized alert messages Family Reunification Allows the posting of and searching for information on missing persons Also attempts to leverage RESCUE project research in text searching to look for information on missing persons outside of application Has potential to support approximate keyword queries Michael Smith Michael Smyth Michael Smth P2P Web Server The authors postulate that during an emergency a web server with critical information on it could be overloaded with requests The web server really technology they created allows an over loaded web server to distribute its load to the clients trying to access it P2P Web Server cont Relies on a project called Flashback created by a subset of the authors Transported frame hack loads a Java applet in one browser frame to act as a web server flashback client the other frame accesses the local Java web server to load the page P2P Web Server cont Also relies on a technique called UDP Hole Punching which uses a known intermediate server to allow two clients behind NATs to communicate with each other Free trivia NAT stands for Network Address Translation not Traversal Traffic Event Detection Uses a live traffic freed from CalTrans to learn normal traffic pattern Then detects abnormal peaks or lulls in traffic and reports it appropriately Useful for planning evacuations and detecting events Internet Information Monitoring Attempts to crawl pre configured websites looked for information on an unfolding event The given event is specified with key words Has a user interface to allow searching of information retrieved from web sites deemed relevant Related Work Sahana Originally created after the 2004 tsunami that hit Sri Lanka by volunteer developers Later expanded and generalized for use in any disaster Currently maintained as an open source product freely available Has seen much broader usage than the Disaster Portal Pakistan Indonesia Peru Myanmar Sahana cont Has basically the same functionality the Disaster Portal but lacks some of the advanced features like searching the web for information on missing persons and the flashback peer to peer web server Based on PHP and Perl not Java Arguably has seen wider use Case Study City of Ontario CA used it during the Fall 07 wildfires Mostly used as a PR device put out press releases announcements with map annotations OFD requested several features including integration with WebEOC and information on the status of public transportation No direct contact with end users general public Ongoing Work Expand usage of system to other communities Allow cloned installations at different locations Incorporate new research into the project Discussion What else might be helpful for emergency responders Help with coordination between agencies so they can speak with the same voice What was this paper missing Better case study description Analysis of how well parts of it worked Larger study Thoughts on the system its self No WebEOC integration Were features included to use RESCUE products rather than what users really needed Was it a solution looking for a problem They did not discuss any user requirements research Lots of liability concerns not addressed References Ford B Srisuresh P Andkegel D Peer to peer communication across network address translators In Proceedings of the 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Anaheim CA Apr 2005 Lickfett J Ashish N Mehrotra S Venkatasubramanian N Green J 2008 The RESCUE Disaster Portal for Disasters and Emergency Response In Proceedings of the 2008 ISCRAM Conference Washington DC Palen L Vieweg S Sutton J Liu S and Hughes A 2007 Crisis Informatics Studying Crisis in a Networked World Paper presented at the Third International Conference on e Social Science Ann Arbor Michigan October 7 9 2007 http ess si umich edu papers paper172 pdf Deshpande M Amit A Chang M Venkatasubramanian N and Mehrotra S 2007 Flashback A Peer to Peer Webserver for Handling Flash Crowds IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems ICDCS Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System Wikipedia http en wikipedia org wiki sahana foss disaster management system De Silva C Raschid L Careem M De Silva R and Weerawarana S 2006 Sahana Overview of a Disaster Management System 2nd International Conference on Information and Automation Colombo Sri Lanka Iannella R Robinson K and Rinta Koski O 2007 Towards a Framework for Crisis Information Management Systems CIMS Proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of The International Emergency Management Society TIEMS Trogir Croatia 5 8 June 2007 Disaster Portal Website http rescue ibm calit2 uci edu DisasterPortalProject disasterportal html