Situational Awareness Technologies for Disaster Response

Abstract

This chapter highlights some of the key information technology challenges being addressed in the RESCUE project, a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded 5-year effort, with a particular focus on situational awareness technologies. A key premise of the project is that the critical decision making required in disaster situations relies heavily on the availability, accuracy, and timeliness of information that can be made available to the decision makers. A major thrust within RESCUE is focusing on developing next generation situational awareness technologies. Our approach in building situational awareness systems is to build information systems that consider situations and events as fundamental entities, and our research is focused on the key technical challenges in the extraction and synthesis, management, and analysis of such situational information. This chapter focuses on our research accomplishments in each of these areas and also provides an overview of technology transition activities.