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Recent wildfires in the United States have resulted in loss of life and billions of dollars, destroying countless structures and forests. Fighting wildfires is extremely complex. It is difficult to observe the true state of fires due to…

Flash floods in urban areas occur with increasing frequency. Detecting these floods would greatlyhelp alleviate human and economic losses. However, current flood prediction methods are eithertoo slow or too simplified to capture the flood…

Wildfire is an important system process of the earth that occurs across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. A variety of methods have been used to predict wildfire phenomena during the past century to better our understanding of…

Social media such as tweets are emerging as platforms contributing to situational awareness during disasters. Information shared on Twitter by both affected population (e.g., requesting assistance, warning) and those outside the impact zone…

Data science pipelines inform and influence many daily decisions, from what we buy to who we work for and even where we live. When designed incorrectly, these pipelines can easily propagate social inequity and harm. Traditional solutions…

The frequency of disruptive and newly emerging threats (e.g. man-made attacks--cyber and physical attacks; extreme natural events--hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods) has escalated dramatically in the last decade. Impacts of these events…

Due to climate change, the extreme wildfire has become one of the most dangerous natural hazards to human civilization. Even though, some wildfires may be initially caused by human activity, but the spread of wildfires is mainly determined…

The urgency of climate change is now recognized globally. As humanity confronts the critical need to mitigate climate change and foster sustainability, data visualization emerges as a powerful tool with a unique capacity to communicate…

Situational awareness is crucial for effective disaster management. However, obtaining information about the actual situation is usually difficult and time-consuming. While there has been some effort in terms of incorporating the affected…

There has been a plethora of work towards improving robot perception and navigation, yet their application in hazardous environments, like during a fire or an earthquake, is still at a nascent stage. We hypothesize two key challenges here:…

How do different audiences make sense of climate change data visualizations and what do they take away as a main message? To investigate this question, we are building on the results of a previous study, focusing on expert opinions…

Due to recent climate changes, we have seen more frequent and severe wildfires in the United States. Predicting wildfires is critical for natural disaster prevention and mitigation. Advances in technologies in data processing and…

An active area of research is to increase the safety of self-driving vehicles. Although safety cannot be guarenteed completely, the capability of a vehicle to predict the future trajectories of its surrounding vehicles could help ensure…

Floods are among the most common and deadly natural disasters in the world, and flood warning systems have been shown to be effective in reducing harm. Yet the majority of the world's vulnerable population does not have access to reliable…

When the underlying conditional density is known, conditional expectations can be computed analytically or numerically. When, however, such knowledge is not available and instead we are given a collection of training data, the goal of this…

With the development of the Internet, social media has become an important channel for posting disaster-related information. Analyzing attitudes hidden in these texts, known as sentiment analysis, is crucial for the government or relief…

The problem of detecting the presence of a signal that can lead to a disaster is studied. A decision-maker collects data sequentially over time. At some point in time, called the change point, the distribution of data changes. This change…

Safety-critical traffic scenarios are integral to the development and validation of autonomous driving systems. These scenarios provide crucial insights into vehicle responses under high-risk conditions rarely encountered in real-world…

The challenges in operational flood forecasting lie in producing reliable forecasts given constrained computational resources and within processing times that are compatible with near-real-time forecasting. Flood hydrodynamic models exploit…

Extreme events, such as market crashes, natural disasters, and pandemics, are rare but catastrophic, often triggering cascading failures across interconnected systems. Accurate prediction and early warning can help minimize losses and…