The need to develop information science and technology to support crisis management has never been more apparent. Federal, state, and local government agencies must develop coordinated strategies and adopt advanced and usable technologies to prepare for and cope with crises in contexts ranging from natural disasters to homeland security. A desire among agencies to coordinate activities, however, is not enough. Meeting the challenges of crisis management in a rapidly changing world will require fundamental information science and technology research. To have an impact, that research must be linked directly with development, implementation, and assessment of new technologies supporting coordinated work within and among government organizations in both civilian and defense sectors. To be useful and usable, that technology development must be human-centered, involving practicing crisis management personnel at all stages.

Crisis management is considered here to include both strategic assessment (work to prepare for and avert crises) and emergency response (activities designed to minimize loss of life and property). Geospatial information plays a key role in both activities, providing context and details about the event itself, its causes, the people and infrastructure affected, and resources available to respond. Crisis management also requires close coordination among individuals and groups of individuals who need to collaboratively derive information from geospatial data and use that information in coordinated ways.

This project addresses fundamental research challenges in two linked domains that underpin GeoCollaborative Crisis Management (GCCM): 1) developing a deep understanding of group work with geospatial information and technology in the context of crisis management and 2) developing advanced, easy to use geospatial technology that supports both same-place and distributed/mobile, dialogue-enabled collaborative crisis management activities. Our approach builds on theories of distributed cognition, emphasizes development of intelligent adaptive systems, applies robust Cognitive Systems Engineering (CSE) methods, and takes a Living Laboratory perspective. The work leverages our collective recent research as well as experience of partner VideoMining, Inc. (formerly Advanced Interfaces) in transitioning research into practice (Chairperson/CEO: CoPI Sharma). AI has a history of cooperative research with Penn State and has been helping to commercialize prior research by Dr. Sharma's group in human-computer interaction.

Our research addresses collaborative geoinformation use and technologies to enable all stages of crisis management (mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery), with an emphasis on preparedness and response. We ground the research in the practice of federal and state government agencies, thus facilitating transition of research results in support of agency missions. Linking theory with practice provides a base from which to develop next generation geospatial information technology solutions. Our vision for next generation distributed GCCM is characterized in the Scenario and figure below.

A Scenario: Imagine a crisis management center with Center Director Jill White and chief logistics manager Jim Smith, in front of the large-screen display provided by the agency's GeoCollaborative Crisis Management (GCCM) system.

The Crystal River nuclear power plant has notified officials that an accident occurred, resulting in a potential radioactive particulate release within 9 hours. Response professionals with a range of expertise, work to determine the impact area, order and carry out evacuations, and deploy RAD health teams to identify 'hot zones' in residential and agricultural areas. Based on available information, immediate decisions must be made about where and how to evacuate or quarantine residents, establishing decontamination checkpoints, deploying rescue and RAD health teams, ordering in-place sheltering, and prioritizing situations. As field personnel deploy, the command Center focuses on coordination of the distributed activity among many participants who are using a range of devices and who have a wide range of geospatial information needs. At right, we represent the multimodal, dialogue-enabled GeoCollaborative Crisis Management methods and technologies we envision, and to which our research is targeted. The central portion of the figure depicts models of the complementary system/human knowledge construction processes and components of the proposed dialogue-enabled links between them.

The research focuses on two specific problem domains relevant to achieving the above vision:

Specific research questions being addressed include: