SCC-IRG Track 1: Socially-integrated robust communication and information-resource sharing technologies for post-disaster community self-reliance

当灾难来袭时，社区往往变得孤立，市民们聚在一起互相帮助：人们共享资源，传递信息，并承担他们通常领域之外的任务。这些活动在学术文献和轶事文件中都有报道。一些例子包括：2005年纽约大都会运输署罢工期间，纽约人共享私人车辆和船只，导致纽约交通服务瘫痪；在北卡罗来纳州罗兰市，邻居们用充气床垫临时制成的木筏帮助邻居逃离2016年飓风马修造成的洪水。这些点对点资源共享活动填补了灾害期间应急机构无法填补的重要空白。本项目通过与华盛顿州的城市和农村、高收入和低收入社区合作，了解并推动灾害期间更有效的地方信息和资源传播，帮助填补了这一空白。该项目整合了硬件、强大的通信技术、社会能力和空间条件，以利用和增强基于地点的社会网络，实现信息资源共享；并调查一个很少被研究的科学前沿领域，涉及通信、共享和灾难恢复能力。对于日益面临自然灾害风险并有兴趣通过信息和资源共享提高抗灾能力的社区来说，该项目的成果将是可扩展的，在日常和紧急情况下都是有用的。更具体地说，该项目将与两个社区共同设计，并在四个重点领域进行研究。推力1 -稳健通信，将发展由社区拥有和运营的稳健的离网社区网络。推进2：构建社区社会网络，实现信息资源共享，通过调查收集人们在社区内的共享行为和社会关系信息，并开发新的模型来推断社区社会网络。推力3：以社区为基础的信息资源共享，将制定有助于有效共享信息资源的模式和战略。关键假设是社会网络结构影响信息资源共享的最优性和稳定性。推力4（动态地图你的邻居）整合了推力1-3的结果，并使用它们与西澳的两个社区（城市和农村）共同设计和试点测试应用程序。多样化的团队专业知识促进了跨学科的知识和方法，通过设计强大的通信技术，以及新颖的方式来征求社会关系信息和信息资源共享模型，这些模型既考虑了模型的最优性，也考虑了人类的输入（例如，来自社区的领导提名）。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

When a disaster strikes, communities often become isolated and citizens come together to help each other: people share resources, pass along information, and take on tasks that are outside of their usual domains. These activities have been reported in both academic literature and anecdotal documents. Some examples include: New Yorkers’ sharing private vehicles and boats during the 2005 MTA strike that crippled NYC transit services; and neighbors helping neighbors escape from flooding caused by 2016’s Hurricane Matthew using rafts improvised from inflatable mattresses in Rowland, NC. These peer-to-peer resource sharing activities fill important gaps during times of disaster that cannot be fulfilled by emergency response agencies. This project helps fill this gap by working with urban and rural, higher- and lower-income communities in Washington State to understand and advance more effective local information and resource dissemination during a disaster. The project integrates hardware, robust communication technologies, social capacities, and spatial conditions to leverage and enhance place-based social networks for information-resource sharing; and investigate a little-studied scientific frontier intersecting communications, sharing, and disaster resilience. The results of the project will be scalable and useful on a daily and emergency basis to communities that increasingly face natural disaster risks and are interested in enhancing their resilience through information and resource sharing. More specifically, the project will co-design with the two communities and conduct research in four thrusts. Thrust 1—robust communications, will develop robust off-grid community-based networks that are owned and operated by the community. Thrust 2—building community social networks for information-resource sharing, will conduct surveys to collect information about people’s sharing behavior and their social ties within a community, and develop novel models to infer community-based social networks. Thrust 3—community-based information-resource sharing, will develop models and strategies that will lead to efficient information-resource sharing. The key hypothesis is that social network structures affect the optimality and stability of information-resource sharing. Thrust 4 (Dynamic Map your Neighborhood) integrates the results of Thrusts 1-3 and uses them to co-design and pilot-test applications with two communities in WA (urban and rural). The diverse team expertise facilitates knowledge and methods across disciplines through the design of robust communication technologies, and novel ways to solicit social ties information and information-resource sharing models that considers both model optimality and human inputs (e.g., leader nominations from the communities).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.