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Timely and reliable sensing of infrastructure conditions is critical in disaster management for planning effective infrastructure restorations. Social media, a near real-time information source, has been widely used in disasters for forming…
Electrical outages continue to occur despite technological innovations and improvements to electric power distribution infrastructure. In this paper, we describe a tool that was designed to acquire and collect data on electric power outages…
The power system is among the most important critical infrastructures in urban cities and is getting increasingly essential in supporting people s daily activities. However, it is also susceptible to most natural disasters such as tsunamis,…
Social technologies have made it possible to propagate disinformation and manipulate the masses at an unprecedented scale. This is particularly alarming from a security perspective, as humans have proven to be the weakest link when…
Extreme weather events are increasingly common due to climate change, posing significant risks. To mitigate further damage, a shift towards renewable energy is imperative. Unfortunately, underrepresented communities that are most affected…
In a world driven by data, cities are increasingly interested in deploying networks of smart city devices for urban and environmental monitoring. To be successful, these networks must be reliable, scalable, real-time, low-cost, and easy to…
Power grid outages cause huge economical and societal costs. Disruptions in the power distribution grid are responsible for a significant fraction of electric power unavailability to customers. The impact of extreme weather conditions,…
Monitoring migration flows is crucial to respond to humanitarian crisis and to design efficient policies. This information usually comes from surveys and border controls, but timely accessibility and methodological concerns reduce its…
Social network data offer interesting opportunities in urban studies. In this study, we used Twitter data to analyse city dynamics over the course of the day. Users of this social network were grouped according to city zone and time slot in…
Physical media (like surveillance cameras) and social media (like Instagram and Twitter) may both be useful in attaining on-the-ground information during an emergency or disaster situation. However, the intersection and reliability of both…
We present the Civique system for emergency detection in urban areas by monitoring micro blogs like Tweets. The system detects emergency related events, and classifies them into appropriate categories like "fire", "accident", "earthquake",…
Nighttime lights satellite imagery has been used for decades as a uniform, global source of data for studying a wide range of socioeconomic factors. Recently, another more terrestrial source is producing data with similarly uniform global…
Large scale power failures induced by severe weather have become frequent and damaging in recent years, causing millions of people to be without electricity service for days. Although the power industry has been battling weather-induced…
Despite significant anecdotal evidence regarding the vulnerability of the U.S. power infrastructure, there is a dearth of longitudinal and nation-level characterization of the spatial and temporal patterns in the frequency and extent of…
This paper discusses the impact of electricity blackouts and poor infrastructure on the livelihood of residents and the local economy of Johannesburg, South Africa. The importance of a stable electricity grid plays a vital role in the…
Modern cities are complex systems, evolving at a fast pace. Thus, many urban planning, political, and economic decisions require a deep and up-to-date understanding of the local context of urban neighborhoods. This study shows that the…
Currently, nearly four billion people live in urban areas. Since this trend is increasing, natural disasters or terrorist attacks in such areas affect an increasing number of people. While information and communication technology is crucial…
Power outages caused by extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, can significantly disrupt essential services and delay recovery efforts, underscoring the importance of enhancing our infrastructure's resilience. This study investigates…
In current study, a mechanism to extract traffic related information such as congestion and incidents from textual data from the internet is proposed. The current source of data is Twitter. As the data being considered is extremely large in…
An important aspect of urban planning is understanding crowd levels at various locations, which typically require the use of physical sensors. Such sensors are potentially costly and time consuming to implement on a large scale. To address…