BDD: Human-Centered Situational Awareness Platform for Disaster Response and Recovery

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Efficient and thorough data collection and its timely analysis are critical to any disaster response and recovery system in order to save people's lives during disasters. However, access to comprehensive data in disaster areas and their quick analysis to transform the data to actionable knowledge are major data science challenges. Moreover, the effective presentation of the collected knowledge to human decision-makers is an open problem. In this project, these challenges of data collection, analysis and presentation are collectively referred to as 'Situational Awareness', and are studied by a collaborative team of data scientists from the University of Southern California (USC) in United States and the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in Japan. The first objective of this project is to devise effective techniques for comprehensive data collection. The challenge is that during disaster the availability of information is spatially biased and some areas are not well covered by available information. Towards this end, USC's spatial crowdsourcing platform, dubbed MediaQ, is utilized to collect pictures and videos on-demand from mobile devices of people in the vicinity of the disaster areas to facilitate effective collection, orchestration and aggregation of information. The second objective is to develop efficient methods for organizing and analyzing incoming data streams for human decision makers, given the challenges of volume and variety of unstructured data whose veracity is unknown. The collaborative US-Japan team takes advantage of their combined expertise in developing Spatial-Temporal-Thematic analytics engines and Geospatial Image Filtering Tools to meet this objective. Finally, for an effective presentation of the knowledge to human stakeholders, NII's DiVE virtual environment engine is used to facilitate seamless presentation and communication for both onsite (humans in the field) and offsite (disaster managers at the center) stakeholders.