EAGER: GeoAlerting: An Exploratory Case Study in Socio-Technical Alerting

该项目的重点是对下一代适应性社会技术危机警报和警报系统进行探索性研究。警报系统通知受危机影响的实体？学校、企业、医院和广大公众？关于迫在眉睫的危险、基础设施的状况、生命线以及旨在减少暴露在自然和人为威胁下的现有帮助和行动？例如，疏散、就地避难所等。最终目标是开发警报系统，以正确的格式和正确的时间向正确的目标发送准确的信息，然而这需要在多个层面上协同探索挑战？自然/地理、网络和用户级别。这是一项初步的探索性工作，旨在将这三个级别有意义地结合到有效的警报方案中。智力价值：具体地说，该项目提供了一种基于地理的警报传播的新模式，结合了地理方面和社会需求。虽然在自然灾害或人为灾害的背景下，信息需求与地理位置密切相关，但在警报传播过程中，这种洞察力从未得到充分利用。首席调查员(PI)推测，社会/用户信息与地理环境相结合可用于改进警报传播过程。特别是，这项研究的目的是增强网络的结构属性，以代表社会和物理连接。这需要了解随着情况的发展，绘制和维护社交网络的哪些方面是有用的。本研究通过以下三个步骤解决上述跨学科研究问题。第一个研究任务是开发创建和维护地理感知覆盖网络的机制，以便对地理相关性进行建模。在第二步中，通过使用地理-社会映射过程来增强地理感知覆盖网络以捕捉和表示社会特征，该过程的结果是地理-社会覆盖网络。最后的研究任务是在警报过程中有效利用地理-社会覆盖网络，以适应潜在故障的已知知识，以便在存在与地理相关的故障的情况下支持在社会范围内的可靠传播。该项目包括一个原型实现，用于在校园试验台上测试/验证研究。更广泛的影响：这项研究为新一代社会技术警报系统铺平了道路，这种系统比目前使用的警报机制有效得多，并为警报系统技术的跨学科研究开辟了新的途径。如果成功，该项目将带来新的方式，利用现有网络基础设施的能力，并在紧急情况下迅速改变其用途，向不同的组织和个人提供危急情况感知和灾害管理信息。PI与与这项研究结果有利害关系的实体有很强的联系，包括地方政府、州和联邦一级的应急管理机构和组织，以及大学和机构的研究人员。与包括多个学科的学术研究人员、行业参与者和政府机构在内的利益攸关方参加的研讨会是该项目的一部分，目的是讨论当前在向公众传播紧急警报方面的程序、系统和挑战。外联工作还将提高人们对即将采用的社会技术警报系统通信模式的认识；它将有助于展示协同结合关于灾害、基础设施和公众的信息的可能性，以达到预期的反应水平。

This project focuses on exploratory research towards the next generation of adaptive socio-technical crisis alerting and warning systems. Alerting systems inform entities affected by crisis ? schools, businesses, hospitals, and the public at large ? about impending dangers, the status of infrastructures, life lines, and available help and actions designed to reduce exposure to natural and human-induced threats ? e.g. evacuate, shelter-in-place etc. The eventual goal is to develop alerting systems that deliver an accurate message to the right targets in the right format and at the right time, however this requires a synergistic exploration of the challenges at multiple levels ? physical/geographical, network and user levels. This effort is an initial exploratory effort that aims to meaningfully combine the three levels into effective alerting schemes. Intellectual Merit: Specifically, this project offers a new model of geography based alert dissemination that incorporates both the geographical aspects and societal needs. While information needs are strongly correlated to the geographical location in the context of a natural or human induced disaster, this insight has never been fully exploited in the alert dissemination process. The principal investigator (PI) conjectures that societal/user information in combination with geographical context can be used to improve the alert dissemination process. In particular, the research aims to enhance the structural properties of a network to represent both the societal and physical connectivity. This requires an understanding of which aspects of a social network are useful to map and maintain as the situation evolves. The research addresses the above interdisciplinary research issues via the following 3 steps. The first research task develops mechanisms to create and maintain a geo-aware overlay network, in order to model geographical correlations. In the second step, the geo-aware overlay network is enhanced to capture and represent societal characteristics by using a geo-social mapping process, and the outcome of this process is a geo-social overlay network. The final research task is that of effective utilization of the geo-social overlay network in the alerting process, which is adaptive to the given knowledge of potential failure, in order to support reliable dissemination at the societal scale in the presence of geo-correlated failures. The project includes a prototype implementation to test/validate the research on a campus testbed. Broader Impact: The research paves the way towards a new generation of socio-technical alerting systems that are far more effective than alerting mechanisms in use today and opens new avenues for interdisciplinary research on technologies for alerting systems. If successful the project will lead to new ways of leveraging the capabilities of existing network infrastructures and quickly repurposing them in emergency situations to provide critical situation awareness and disaster management information to diverse organizations and individuals. The PI has strong ties with entities that have a stake in the outcome of this research, including local governments, emergency management agencies and organizations at the state and federal level, and university- and agency-based researchers. A workshop with stakeholders including academic researchers from multiple disciplines, industry participants and government agencies is part of this project to discuss current processes, systems and challenges in disseminating emergency alerts in public. Outreach efforts will also raise awareness of the upcoming communication models for socio-technical alerting systems; it will help demonstrate the possibility of synergistically combining information about the disaster, infrastructure and the public to achieve the desired level of response.