BD Spokes:PLANNING: MIDWEST: Networked Resilience of Communities Facing Natural and Social Emergencies

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

One of the critical challenges civil societies face is coping with emergencies due to natural or human-created disasters, such as major floods, tornadoes, or civic unrest. Resilience, the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to plan for, respond to, and recover from adverse situations, is critical and can be improved by a systematic, scientific process. This project will investigate the potential for Big Data-- harnessed through integrated and networked data resources, along with the proper analytics--to benefit preparation, response, and recovery processes. The project will bring together leaders in disaster response at state, county, and city levels with data scientists to craft a plan to capitalize on existing data and to utilize previously untapped data for emergency response and recovery. Potential benefits include improved forecasting of incidents and their impacts, more efficient and effective utilization of resources, enhanced situational awareness during response, and improved planning for recovery. The project will also define issues related to policies for data sharing and management and may lead to the development of new policy models. The interaction between experienced emergency management personnel and data scientists will disclose novel combinations of data and tools that can benefit planning, response, and recovery. The project also has the potential to develop a community of practice focused on data in resilience and incident response in several Midwestern states. The project will tackle several key challenges. First, the data involved are "big" in terms of volume, velocity, and complexity. Second, all emergency and disaster response is locally controlled in the U.S., and each jurisdiction has traditionally been responsible for collecting its own data regarding equipment and resources, which introduces variability in format and types of data collected across locales and over time. Third, data sharing across jurisdictions creates issues related to ownership of data and privacy that require the development of policies and administrative regimes. Fourth, a great deal of the data is unstructured. To address these challenges, the team will convene a representative set of stakeholders and experts in five step process to develop requirements and recommendations concerning the contributions an integrated data resource can make to community resilience. The stakeholders will include leaders in emergency response and policing, public health, state and local government, subject matter experts, data scientists, and analysts representing several Midwestern states. Participants will define key questions, the types of data needed to answer them, and what outputs would be contribute to resilience. The team will also identify a comprehensive list of stakeholders who should be involved in a full project and metrics for measuring success of the project. Participating states include Illinois, Indiana, and North Dakota. The product will be a plan set to take this effort to the next stage, implementation of data resources for community resilience in the face of disaster and emergencies.