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New crisis response and management approaches that incorporate the latest information technologies are essential in all phases of emergency preparedness and response, including the planning, response, recovery, and assessment phases.…
Recently, the world has witnessed the most severe pandemic (COVID-19) in this century. Studies on epidemic prediction and simulation have received increasing attention. However, the current methods suffer from three issues. First, most of…
This paper complements the large body of social sensing literature by developing means for augmenting sensing data with inference results that "fill-in" missing pieces. It specifically explores the synergy between (i) inference techniques…
Many of the services a smart city can provide to its citizens rely on the ability of its infrastructure to collect and process in real time vast amounts of continuous data that sensors deployed through the city produce. In this paper we…
Intelligent assistive technologies are increasingly recognized as critical daily-use enablers for people with disabilities and age-related functional decline. Longitudinal studies, curation of quality datasets, live monitoring in activities…
Developing models and algorithms to predict nonstationary time series is a long standing statistical problem. It is crucial for many applications, in particular for fashion or retail industries, to make optimal inventory decisions and avoid…
Industry demands are growing for hyper-distributed applications that span from the cloud to the edge in domains such as smart manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture. Yet today's solutions struggle to meet these demands due to…
Social networks are widely used for information consumption and dissemination, especially during time-critical events such as natural disasters. Despite its significantly large volume, social media content is often too noisy for direct use…
Social media platforms are now a key source of information for a large segment of the public. As such, these platforms have a great potential as a means to provide real-time information to emergency management agencies. Moreover, during an…
Along with climate change, more frequent extreme events, such as flooding and tropical cyclones, threaten the livelihoods and wellbeing of poor and vulnerable populations. One of the most immediate needs of people affected by a disaster is…
Operational safety at mission-critical work sites is a top priority given the complex and hazardous nature of daily tasks. This paper presents the Human-Agent Risk Navigation and Event Safety System (HARNESS), a modular AI framework…
The extensive use of social media platforms, especially during disasters, creates unique opportunities for humanitarian organizations to gain situational awareness and launch relief operations accordingly. In addition to the textual…
The work of Emergency Management (EM) agencies requires timely collection of relevant data to inform decision-making for operations and public communication before, during, and after a disaster. However, the limited human resources…
With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), the ever growing number of connected devices observed in recent years and foreseen for the next decade suggests that more and more data will have to be transmitted over a network, before…
Autonomous robots can benefit greatly from human-provided semantic characterizations of uncertain task environments and states. However, the development of integrated strategies which let robots model, communicate, and act on such 'soft…
We introduce the hyperedge event model (HEM)---a generative model for events that can be represented as directed edges with one sender and one or more receivers or one receiver and one or more senders. We integrate a dynamic version of the…
Humanitarian disasters have been on the rise in recent years due to the effects of climate change and socio-political situations such as the refugee crisis. Technology can be used to best mobilize resources such as food and water in the…
The contemporary era is marked by rapid urban growth and increasing population. A significant, and constantly growing, portion of the global population now resides in major cities, leading to escalating energy demands in urban centers. As…
Social networks can serve as a valuable communication channel for calls for help, offering assistance, and coordinating rescue activities in disaster. Social networks such as Twitter allow users to continuously update relevant information,…
Modern society is critically dependent on the services provided by engineered infrastructure networks. When natural disasters (e.g. Hurricane Sandy) occur, the ability of these networks to provide service is often degraded because of…