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Real-time emergency response: improved management of real-time information during crisis situations

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Abstract

The decision-making process during crisis and emergency scenarios intertwines human intelligence with infocommunications. In such scenarios, the tasks of data acquisition, manipulation, and analysis involve a combination of cognitive processes and information and communications technologies, all of which are vital to effective situational awareness and response capability. To support such capabilities, we describe our real time emergency response (rtER) system, implemented with the intention of helping to manage the potential torrents of data that are available during a crisis, and that could easily overwhelm human cognitive capacity in the absence of technological mediation. Specifically, rtER seeks to address the research challenges surrounding the real-time collection of relevant data, especially live video, making this information rapidly available to a team of humans, and giving them the tools to manipulate, tag, and filter the most critical information of relevance to the situation.

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Notes

  1. Adobe Flash player may be the exception, which supports latencies under 3 s with careful parameter tuning.

  2. A demonstration video of the prototype is available from http://srl.cim.mcgill.ca/rter.

  3. As an example, see http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html.

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Acknowledgments

The work described in this manuscript was implemented thanks to the hard work of several additional developers including Nehil Jain, Stepan Salenikovich, Stephane Beniak, Cameron Bell, and Alok Sharma. In addition, the authors would like to thank Scott Reuter of the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, David Black of Crisis Commons, Thomas Poirier-Blanchet of the Minstry for Public Safety (Quebec), and Roger Hand, Emergency Management Director, City of Red Wing, all of whom have been extremely generous in sharing their knowledge and experience with us throughout the development process. Special thanks are due to Glenn Ricart of US Ignite and Will Barkis of Mozilla Ignite for their constant encouragement and inspiration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Intelligent Machines, McGill University, 3480 University Street, Montreal, QC, H3A 0E9, Canada

    Jeffrey R. Blum, Alexander Eichhorn, Severin Smith, Michael Sterle-Contala & Jeremy R. Cooperstock

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  1. Jeffrey R. Blum
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  2. Alexander Eichhorn
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Correspondence to Jeremy R. Cooperstock.

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This work has been generously supported by a Networks of Centres of Excellence in Graphics, Animation and New Media (GRAND) and by funding supplied by the National Science Foundation through the Mozilla Ignite Challenge.

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Blum, J.R., Eichhorn, A., Smith, S. et al. Real-time emergency response: improved management of real-time information during crisis situations. J Multimodal User Interfaces 8, 161–173 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12193-013-0139-7

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