Major disasters create extreme stresses on the building elements of a community. Until now, a splintered structure dominated the emergency management landscape, leaving each community or county responsible for preparing for the disasters. This fragmented approach often creates significant risk exposures to communities, and limited resources result in significant loss of life and property. Given the advancements of Information Technologies lately, the response planners and responders are able to exploit a wide variety of ICT technologies and tools to assist them during an incident. EU research is rather interested in this domain, which is also reflected by relevant EU H2020 co-funded projects like beAWARE, SAFERS, INGENIOUS, CURSOR, aqua3S and IN-PREP.
Big Data and Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, in particular affected by machine and deep learning paradigms, are advancing at an astounding pace and appear to have the potential to significantly enhance disaster risk reduction, through their application, for instance, in (i) computer vision tools for automated event detection, etc. (ii) autonomous robotic systems and IoT sensors, (iii) Web and social data mining, (iv) predictive analytics for optimising end-users resources, and others.
Many countries are exploring AI technologies for disaster management, but adoption is still pending in several cases as important issues (such as the auditability of AI systems and privacy concerns) need to be resolved. This workshop aims to provide a forum to advance the understanding of the current and prospective opportunities and risks of AI for disaster management through discussing the current status of AI technologies, their potential applications, as well as the ethical, legal, and social implications posed by the adoption of these technologies. The workshop targets end users, industry partners, academic researchers, and civil society. The main outcome of the workshop will be a white paper which will outline the future directions of Big Data and AI for Disaster Risk Reduction.
This is the third ISCRAM ICMT workshop following the very successful ones in ISCRAM 2018 and 2019.
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