RESCUER PROJECT

RESCUER’s Goals & Components

The RESCUER project aims at developing an interoperable computer-based solution to support command centres in quickly handling emergencies and managing crisis based on reliable and intelligent analysis of crowdsourcing information mashed up with open data. The special focus is on incidents in industrial areas and at large-scale events.

The RESCUER solution will be composed of four main components:

Mobile Crowdsourcing Solution

whose goal is to support eyewitnesses (including first responders) and formal responders in providing the command centre with information about emergency situations, taking into account the different types of smartphones that might be used and how people interact with smartphones under stress. We will investigate two types of information gathering, either without user interaction (when information is automatically collected from the mobile devices) and with user interaction (when users provide reports of the incidents with text, photos and videos). We will consider suitable context-sensitive mechanisms for eyewitnesses and operational forces carrying mobile devices to provide relevant information to the command and control centre without risking adverse consequences to life and property.

Data Analysis Solutions

which include approaches for integrating data from different operational forces as well as for combining, filtering, and analysing crowdsourcing information mashed up with open data. It is composed by several modules, such as: 1) the Data Fusion and Filtering Component, which is a pre-processing module that classifies, aggregates and enhances the raw data acquired through the Mobile Crowdsourcing Solution, unifying terminology and prioritizing relevant information, considering different data quality factors; 2) the Data Analysis, whose goal is to provide multimedia descriptions of crisis situations by means of analytical techniques that deal with images, videos and texts to semi-automatically detect situations such as fire, smoke, explosion and crowd; 3) the Data Integration, which provides an interoperable solution to allow the RESCUER system integration with existing systems, used by command centres and operational forces, including dealing with different vocabularies; and 4) the Data Usage Control, which includes an analysis of the required policies that can be defined to guarantee the aspects of security and confidentiality of the data managed by RESCUER, either public or private.

Emergency Response Toolkit

to provide the command centre with the updated and relevant information, in the appropriate format, to support decision-making in the different phases of an emergency. This component aims to investigate different visualization metaphors that can be applied to the crowdsourcing data analysed and aggregated by the Data Analysis Solutions, to accomplish a clear and efficient communication with the command and control centre. The final result for this task is the design and development of a Real Time Dashboard as a support tool for crisis mapping. This mapping includes the visualisation of multimedia data, as image and videos.

Communication Infrastructure

to support the information flow between the crowd and the command centre even when traditional communication infrastructure are overloaded. Since network infrastructure frequently becomes unavailable during emergencies, this component also investigates how an AdHoc-like networking approach can be used to propagate data between users’ phones and the command centre.