Disaster Resilient Smart World

Motivation

The task force "Disaster Resilient Smart World, DiRSW" of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Smart World Technical Committee (SWTC) is motivated by the fact that despite tremendous technological advances in smart homes and buildings, Internet of Things (IoT) and related areas, many basic services that can help us to be resilient against disasters are still missing. For example, there are still no scalable and responsive indoor positioning services (IPS) to help us locate ourselves sufficiently accurately in large public buildings amidst large crowds when the Internet, WiFi, and cell connections are disrupted. Today, a common practice is still to translate machine-readable early disaster alerts issued by alert authorities into warnings and deliver them to people with no specific instructions on how to respond at their locations; it is far more effective to send the alerts to ubiquitous smart things and mobile applications and let them process the alerts and take location-specific risk reduction actions automatically to reduce our chance of injury and property damages. During emergencies, even the most advanced smart buildings lack information infrastructure capable of delivering to hundreds and thousands of mobile devices fine-scale, location-specific decision support data and preparedness/response instructions within the required response time ranging from a few seconds to minutes depending on the type of emergency.
 
The primary focus of the proposed DiRSW task force will be on the preparedness and response phases of disaster management. The task force will collaborate closely with other task forces (e.g., the Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems Task Force) of IEEE CIS SWTC but will complement them by focusing on sciences and technologies in the smart world and related areas that can significantly advance the state of the art and practices in disaster preparedness and responses.

Goals

The DiRSW task force aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and solution providers in disaster management, IoT, smart buildings, building management and safety 3 systems, and related areas is to identify and overcome challenges, share solutions and establish future collaborations needed to pave the road of transforming research prototypes into matured, widely deployable smart, active devices, systems/services and applications for disaster preparedness and response. Below are examples of specific goals:
  

·         To stimulate research, advanced development, and technology transfer activities by organizing workshops, tutorials, panel sessions, and special issues on sciences and technologies that are enablers of a disaster-resilient smart world.

·         To compile incrementally an open virtual repository of knowledge/information/data to be shared among the DiRSW and SWTC community and collaborators. (The proposed repository is virtual in the sense that it will provide users with access to its contents, hiding from the users the fact that the data reside physically in independent websites and databases.) For a start, the repository will contain an overview, data, and information on the underlying principles, capabilities, and capability/performance gaps of state-of-the-art and advanced early disaster warning systems, including the Indian Ocean tsunami warning system; early earthquake warning systems in earthquake-prone regions; and early warning systems for debris flows, landslides and avalanches. rockslides and other geophysical risks/events. Other shared resources will include benchmark traces of CAP alerts and emergency scenarios and building information models, facility management, and environment data of representative test sites for experimentation/testing purposes.

·         To carry out dialogues with other task forces within the CIS IEEE SWTC and related standards bodies on models, reference architectures, and interfaces of active emergency preparedness/response systems and smart things in them with smart things for other purposes and on requirements of their common information support infrastructures.

Scope

·         The topics within the scope of the DiRSW task force include the following ones:

·         Security and safety of active emergency preparedness/response systems containing a vast number of diverse active smart things and mobile applications.

·         Testbed, tools, and benchmark scenarios for assessing functionalities, performance, and dependability of active disaster preparedness/response systems.

·         Interfaces and interoperability with diverse sensors and actuators in a smart world.

·         Disaster resilient information and communication infrastructure.

·         Building/environment data fog/mist for responsible delivery of fine-scale, location-specific, decision support, and situation awareness data and information in real-time.

·         Building information models and facility management data to support location specificity.

·         Use of sensors and surveillance devices in the smart world for real-time damage assessment.
Innovative dual usages of active smart devices, applications, and systems.

·         Regulatory and legal issues arise from the use of disaster risk reduction technologies.

 

Task Force Committee

Chair:

Yan Bai

Professor and Director of Master of Cybersecurity and Leadership Program

School of Engineering and Technology

University of Washington Tacoma

Vice-Chairs:

Lin Li

Associate Professor

Computer Science Department
Prairie View A&M University

 

Juan Li

Professor

Computer Science Department
North Dakota State University

 

Committee Members:

·         Raj Rajkumar, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

·         Lui Sha, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, US

·         Kwei-Jay Lin, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California - Irvine, USA

·         Lothar Thiele, Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland

·         Masaru Yarime, School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

·         Song Guo, Department of Computing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

·         Joseph Kee Yin Ng, Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

·         Zhao Wei, Areas CPS and smart environment, University of Macau, Macau

·         Jianhua Ma, Faculty of Computer & Information Sciences, Hosei University, Japan

·         Yunchuan Sun, Business School, Beijing Normal University, China

·         Celimuge Wu, Computer and Network Engineering, University of Electro-Communication, Japan

·         Girija Chetty, Faculty of Education, Science Technology and Math, University of Canberra, Australia

·         Ghassan Beydoun, School of Systems, Management and Leadership, University of Technology Sidney, Australia

·         Feng-Tyan Lin, Department of Urban Planning, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

·         Wei-Bin Lee, Department of Information Technology, Taipei City Government, Taipei,Taiwan

·         Jane W. S. Liu, Institute of Information Science and Research Center of Information Technology Innovation, Academia Sinica, Taiwan