HCC: Large: Collaborative Research: Widescale Computer-Mediated Communication in Crisis Response: Roles, Trust & Accuracy in the Social Distribution of Information

信息和通信技术（ICT）有望帮助减少自然灾害、流行病和恐怖主义威胁造成的大规模破坏的影响。本研究侧重于大规模应急响应的一个关键方面——公众的需求和作用。通过将公民视为一种强大的、自组织的、集体智慧的力量，信息通信技术可以在危机情况下发挥变革性作用。这种通过信息通信技术增强的公民社会观点是基于关于人们在危机中如何表现的社会行为知识，而不是基于简化和神话般的描述。该项目将应急工作重新定义为社会分布式信息系统，旨在通过重用可公开获得的计算机媒介通信（例如，社区、地图和社会网络站点；博客；推特），利用公众的知识。该项目将研究和整合这些异构信息，并通过自然语言处理以及信任和声誉建模的信息提取技术，添加元信息，帮助用户评估上下文、有效性、来源、可信度和及时性，从而根据高度本地化、不断变化的条件做出最佳决策。这项研究的结果涉及政策、实践和技术创新问题，直接回应了国家政策声明中确定的需求，包括国家科学技术委员会减灾小组委员会的大挑战#1，该挑战要求提供“危险和灾害信息，何时何地需要”（SDR, 2005）。风险人群受到危机的影响尤为严重；这项研究的结果可以减轻对这些社区的影响。这项研究还包括了美国境内不同文化/种族群体和来自不同国家的人。该项目扩大了未来的STEM劳动力，因为计算研究的社会技术和实践方向吸引了女性学习STEM学科。研究贡献包括基于产生危机数据的社会结构的经验知识构建的网络基础设施感知应用、技术和服务。

Information and communication technology (ICT) promises to help reduce impacts of large-scale disruptions from natural hazards, pandemics, and terrorist threat. This research focuses on a critical aspect of large-scale emergency response -- the needs and roles of members of the public. By viewing the citizenry as a powerful, self-organizing, and collectively intelligent force, ICT can play a transformational role in crisis situations. This view of a civil society augmented by ICT is based on socio-behavioral knowledge about how people behave in crisis, rather than on simplified and mythical portrayals. With a critical reframing of emergency response as a socially-distributed information system, the project aims to leverage the knowledge of members of the public through reuse of publicly available computer mediated communications (CMCs) (e.g., community, mapping, and social networking sites; blogs; Twitter). The project will study and integrate that heterogeneous information and -- with techniques of information extraction through natural language processing as well as trust and reputation modeling -- add meta-information to help users assess context, validity, source, credibility, and timeliness to make the best decisions for their highly localized, changing conditions.The results of this research addresses matters of policy, practice and technological innovation, responding directly to needs identified in national policy statements, including Grand Challenge #1 of the National Science and Technology Council's Subcommittee on Disaster Reduction, which calls for the provision of "hazard and disaster information where and when it is needed" (SDR, 2005). At-risk populations are disproportionately affected by crises; the results of this research could mitigate the impacts on these communities. The research is also inclusive of people across different cultures/ethnic groups within the U.S. and from different countries. The project broadens the future STEM workforce, since socio-technical and practical orientations to computational research attract women to study STEM disciplines. The research contributions include cyberinfrastructure-aware applications, techniques, and services built from empirical knowledge of the social structures that produce crisis data.