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No place like home: pet-to-family reunification after disaster

Published: 05 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Pets are important household members, and their welfare and safety are imperative to the emotional welfare of the family. Displacement of pets after disaster events is a serious matter to families and for public safety at large. People are not willing to evacuate without their non-human family members; many will break through evacuation zones to recover animals left behind. In the 2005 Hurricane Katrina event, over 200,000 pets were displaced, and 95% of them were never reunited with their families. The US Department of Agriculture confirms that the problem of reuniting displaced pets and their guardians at this scale is unfortunately common in disaster events. We introduce No Place Like Home, a socially networked web and mobile platform that facilitates reunification of non-human with human family members following disaster events. No Place Like Home is an effort that supports the formation of small cadres of micro-tasking 'digital volunteers' that converge after disasters to do photo- and description-matching; employs a reputation and reward system to encourage use; and uses match-based machine learning techniques to accelerate the manual matching tasks performed by digital volunteers.

References

[1]
Fritz, C. E. and J.H. Mathewson. 1957. Convergence Behavior in Disasters: A Problem in Social Control. Committee on Disaster Studies, Disaster Research Group. Washington, D.C.: National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences.
[2]
Hunt, M., Al-Awadi, H, & Johnson, M. (2008). Psychological sequelae of pet loss following Hurricane Katrina. A Multidisciplinary Journal of the Interactions of People & Animals, Vol 21, Number 2, June 2008, pp.109--121(13).
[3]
Lowe, S, Rhodes J, Zwiebach, L. and Chan, C (2000) The Impact of Pet Loss on the Perceived Social Support and Psychological Distress of Hurricane Survivors, Journal of Traumatic Stress, 22:3 pp. 244-
[4]
McNabb, M. (2007). Pets in the eye of the storm: Hurricane Katrina floods the courts with pet custody disputes. 14 Animal L. 71 (2007--2008).
[5]
Palen, L., Anderson, K. M., Mark, G., Martin, J., Sicker, D., Palmer, M., & Grunwald, D. (2010). A vision for technology-mediated support for public participation & assistance in mass emergencies & disasters. Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science Conference (p. 8). British Computer Society.
[6]
Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act of 2006. Public Law 109--308 (2006) Citation 2006 120 STAT. 1725.
[7]
Starbird, K and Palen, L. (2011). "Voluntweeters": Self-Organizing by Digital Volunteers in Times of Crisis. Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference of Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011). Vancouver, CA.

Cited By

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  • (2017)Pets and Evacuation: An Ongoing Challenge in DisastersJournal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management10.1515/jhsem-2016-005113:4Online publication date: 20-Jun-2017
  • (2014)Supporting the Information Management Needs of People Helping Animals in DisastersProceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/2660398.2660441(278-280)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2014
  • (2014)Digital mobilization in disaster responseProceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing10.1145/2531602.2531633(866-876)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2014

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI EA '12: CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      May 2012
      2864 pages
      ISBN:9781450310161
      DOI:10.1145/2212776

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      New York, NY, United States

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      Published: 05 May 2012

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      Author Tags

      1. crisis informatics
      2. digital volunteerism
      3. disaster
      4. pet reunification

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      View all
      • (2017)Pets and Evacuation: An Ongoing Challenge in DisastersJournal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management10.1515/jhsem-2016-005113:4Online publication date: 20-Jun-2017
      • (2014)Supporting the Information Management Needs of People Helping Animals in DisastersProceedings of the 2014 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work10.1145/2660398.2660441(278-280)Online publication date: 9-Nov-2014
      • (2014)Digital mobilization in disaster responseProceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing10.1145/2531602.2531633(866-876)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2014

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