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In an increasingly complex, mobile and interconnected world, we face growing threats of disasters, whether by chance or deliberately. Disruption of coordinated response and recovery efforts due to organizational, technical, procedural,…

Fires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, overcrowding, or and even pandemic viruses endanger human lives. Hence, designing infrastructures to handle possible emergencies has become an ever-increasing need. The safe evacuation of occupants…

In most of today's emergency scenarios information plays a crucial role. Therefore, information has to be constantly collected and shared among all rescue team members and this requires new innovative technologies. In this paper a…

The use of social media as a means of communication has significantly increased over recent years. There is a plethora of information flow over the different topics of discussion, which is widespread across different domains. The ease of…

This paper explores the idea of smart building evacuation when evacuees can belong to different categories with respect to their ability to move and their health conditions. This leads to new algorithms that use the Cognitive Packet Network…

School and College campuses face a perceived threat of violent crimes and require a realistic plan against unpredictable emergencies and disasters. Existing emergency systems (e.g., 911, campus-wide alerts) are quite useful, but provide…

The first responder community has traditionally relied on calls from the public, officially-provided geographic information and maps for coordinating actions on the ground. The ubiquity of social media platforms created an opportunity for…

Emergency Response Management (ERM) is a critical problem faced by communities across the globe. Despite this, it is common for ERM systems to follow myopic decision policies in the real world. Principled approaches to aid ERM…

Real-time social media data can provide useful information on evolving hazards. Alongside traditional methods of disaster detection, the integration of social media data can considerably enhance disaster management. In this paper, we…

During a disaster event, images shared on social media helps crisis managers gain situational awareness and assess incurred damages, among other response tasks. Recent advances in computer vision and deep neural networks have enabled the…

Optimal decision-making is key to efficient allocation and scheduling of repair resources (e.g., crews) to service affected nodes of large power grid networks. Traditional manual restoration methods are inadequate for modern smart grids…

Over the past couple of decades, the number of wildfires and area of land burned around the world has been steadily increasing, partly due to climatic changes and global warming. Therefore, there is a high probability that more people will…

Social networks enable users to freely communicate with each other and share their recent news, ongoing activities or views about different topics. As a result, they can be seen as a potentially viable source of information to understand…

With increasing threats by large attacks or disasters, the time has come to reconstruct network infrastructures such as communication or transportation systems rather than to recover them as before in case of accidents, because many real…

Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. During time-critical events, the public shares a variety of posts on social media including reports for resource needs, damages, and help offerings for the affected community.…

With the growing popularity of mobile smart devices, the existing networks are unable to meet the requirement of many complex scenarios; current network architectures and protocols do not work well with the network with high latency and…

Images shared on social media help crisis managers gain situational awareness and assess incurred damages, among other response tasks. As the volume and velocity of such content are typically high, real-time image classification has become…

Hurricanes are costly natural disasters periodically faced by households in coastal and to some extent, inland areas. A detailed understanding of evacuation behavior is fundamental to the development of efficient emergency plans. Once a…

During and after disasters, highways provide vital routes for emergency services, relief efforts, and evacuation activities. Thus, a timely and reliable assessment of disaster impacts on highways is critical for decision-makers to quickly…

Disaster response is critical to save lives and reduce damages in the aftermath of a disaster. Fundamental to disaster response operations is the management of disaster relief resources. To this end, a local agency (e.g., a local emergency…