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

该项目的重点是探索性研究，以适应下一代社会技术危机警报和预警系统。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？关于即将发生的危险、基础设施的状况、生命线以及旨在减少自然和人为威胁的现有帮助和行动？最终目标是开发警报系统，以正确的格式和在正确的时间向正确的目标提供准确的信息，但这需要在多个层面上对挑战进行协同探索？物理/地理、网络和用户级别。这项工作是一项初步探索性工作，旨在将这三个级别有意义地联合收割机结合成有效的警报方案。智力优势：具体而言，该项目提供了一种新的基于地理的警报传播模式，将地理方面和社会需求结合起来。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，但在警报发布过程中从未充分利用这一认识。 主要研究者（PI）确认，社会/用户信息与地理背景相结合可用于改善警报传播过程。特别是，该研究旨在增强网络的结构特性，以代表社会和物理连接。这需要了解随着情况的发展，社交网络的哪些方面对映射和维护有用。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，以模拟地理相关性。在第二步中，增强地理感知覆盖网络以通过使用地理社会映射过程来捕获和表示社会特征，并且该过程的结果是地理社会覆盖网络。最后的研究任务是，有效利用的地理社会覆盖网络的警报过程中，这是适应给定的知识的潜在故障，以支持可靠的传播在社会规模的存在地理相关的故障。该项目包括一个原型实现，以测试/验证校园试验台上的研究。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，这些系统比今天使用的警报机制更有效，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，该项目将带来利用现有网络基础设施功能的新方法，并在紧急情况下快速重新利用它们，为各种组织和个人提供关键情况意识和灾害管理信息。PI与本研究成果相关的实体有着密切的联系，包括地方政府、州和联邦级的应急管理机构和组织，以及大学和机构的研究人员。与利益相关者，包括来自多个学科的学术研究人员，行业参与者和政府机构的研讨会是该项目的一部分，以讨论当前的流程，系统和在公共场合传播紧急警报的挑战。外联工作还将提高人们对即将推出的社会技术警报系统通信模式的认识;它将有助于证明，有可能以协同增效的方式将有关灾害、基础设施和公众的信息结合起来，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.