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Call for Papers: Computers, Environment, and Urban Systems (CEUS) (Elsevier)

Special issue on: “Advances in geospatial emergency management”

Special issue editors: Matt Duckham, Mark W. Horner, Allison Kealy, Eren Erman Ozguven

A more populous and interconnected world with a warming climate is anticipated to lead to increasing incidence and severity of natural and anthropogenic disasters. Making smart use of available information about space and time is integral to improving success across the spectrum of emergency management activities, whether dealing with issues of preparedness, response, recovery, mitigation, rescue, or reconstruction.

In this special issue we invite original research articles (8,000 words or less) addressing the state-of-the-art in using spatial information and geographic information systems (GIS) to emergency management issues, broadly defined (e.g. disaster preparedness, assessing infrastructure vulnerability, evacuation and sheltering, etc.). Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the support of emergency management, modeling, and planning activities related to:

> Crowd sourced and user-generated spatial data;
> Visualization of complex, dynamic, multi-scale, or uncertain emergency information;
> Spatiotemporal situational awareness for emergency responders or controllers;
> Position and localization systems, algorithm and techniques for emergency applications including alternatives to GNSS, integrated/hybrid solutions and indoor systems;
> Real-time emergency spatial decision support systems, such as for evacuation planning or supply/commodity transportation;
> Applications of spatial information and GIS to specific emergency scenarios, such as wildfires, flooding, multimodal transport assessments, and evacuations;
> Use of GIS-based solutions to serve the needs of vulnerable populations in emergency operations
> Application and innovative use of novel spatial sensing technologies for emergency applications, such as satellite imagery, geosensor networks, UAVs, terrestrial and airborne laser scanning and other spatial imaging systems; and
> Computational approaches in emergency management such as spatial optimization modeling, agent-based modeling, and network analysis.

We also encourage original and comprehensive literature reviews on topics relevant to the issue theme.

All submissions must be original, never published in similar or abridged form in English, or any other language. The deadline for submissions is August 25th 2015. Submissions must conform to CEUS submission guidelines. Submissions will be rigorously reviewed by at least three international expert reviewers. The Elsevier journal management system is open to accept submissions. Instructions for authors are available at http://ees.elsevier.com/ceus/default.asp. When submitting, please use “SI: AGEM” when selecting the “Article Type” for your submission. CEUS has an impact factor of 1.520.

For more information feel free to contact one of the special issue editors: Matt Duckham (mduckham@unimelb.edu.au), Mark W. Horner (mhorner@fsu.edu), Allison Kealy (akealy@unimelb.edu.au), Eren Erman Ozguven (eozguven@fsu.edu).

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computers-environment-and-urban-systems/
http://riser.net.au/?p=587

ANZDM conference

Duckham, M., Kealy, A., Tolhurst, K. (2014) RISERnet: Situational awareness using environmental sensor networks. In: Australian and New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference.

Matt, Allison, and Peter joined Kevin in Creswick on 6th February to work on several related tasks. In particular, the mini-workshop focused on fuel moisture computations, laying the groundwork for the design of a system to use RISERnet data to compute fine-grained fuel moisture measures.

Allison was successful in being awarded funding from MERIT (Melbourne School of Engineering) to support Francisco Escobar to work at the University of Melbourne as a visiting scholar in November 2014. Francisco is a world expert in cartography and spatial information systems, and plans to collaborate with the RISER team on the ongoing development of innovative user interfaces for emergency information systems.

Matt has joined the WIFIRE Advisory Board, which provides strategic advice to the WIFIRE project based at UCSD in San Diego. WIFIRE is a sister-project to RISER investigating wildfire predictions and simulations, and led by UCSD researcher Ilkay Altintas. WIFIRE was awarded $2.65M USD funding from the NSF and is building strong links to the RISER project, on which UCSD is a partner organization.

The first RISER Project Management Committee meeting was held on 20 December 2013 at the Office of the Fire Services Commissioner in the Melbourne CBD. The RISER PMC provide strategic guidance to the RISER project, reviewing progress and providing strategic advice on the research direction. At the meeting were PMC members Jessica Block, Matt Duckham, Juerg von Kaenel, Kim Lowell, and John Schauble. In addition to providing the opportunity to review early progress in the project, the PMC discussed a RISER white paper setting out the plans for progress in the three key RISER research areas: new data streams, novel methods for data integration, and innovative interfaces for user interaction.

The RISER team was involved in four presentations at MODSIM, the 20th International Congress on Modelling and Simulation. MODSIM was held this year in Adelaide, December 1-6. PhD student Lisa Cheong presented her work on evaluating interfaces for decision making under uncertainty in a bushfire context. Her abstract was entitled:

Cheong, L.M., Bleisch, S., Duckham, M., Kealy, A., Tolhurst, K. and Wilkening, T. (2013) A methodology for evaluating the impact of visualization on decision-making under uncertainty for PHOENIX Rapidfire. Proc. MODSIM 2013, p50.

Matt and Allison attended a Dagstuhl Seminar on Geosensor Networks. The Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz Center for Informatics in Germany is one of the leading centers for informatics in the world, with a long waiting list to host seminars. Matt was one of the organizers of the seminar, entitled: Geosensor Networks: Bridging Algorithms and Applications. The week-long seminar brought together researchers from around the world with expertise in the theory, design, and deployment of geosensor networks for an intensive collaboration. The aim of the seminar was to foster better knowledge transfer from theoretical approaches to geosensor networks through to practical applications, such as that being attempted in the RISER project.

On 21 October, Allison and Matt attended an AFAC collaboration event entitled Exploring a ‘Mountain of Data’. The participants included providers and recipients of emergency management information from across the country, and Matt gave a short presentation on the RISER project.

We are seeking an outstanding early career academic (post-doc) with a strong grounding in geographic information science and a specialization in geovisualization or geovisual analytics to work on the RISER project. For more information, see the official position advertisement.

Matt Duckham gave a talk introducing RISER and previous NDRGS and MSE Iconic projects to the joint NDMRI/ADMP seminar at the University of Melbourne on 8 October 2013. The slides for the presentation can be viewed via Prezi.

Congratulations to WIFIRE, a major research project on wildfire predictions and simulations led by UCSD researcher Ilkay Altintas, which was awarded $2.65M USD funding from the NSF. The project further strengthens the RISER project’s strong link to UCSD in the area of information systems for emergency management. UCSD and RISER researcher Jessica Block is also collaborator on the WIFIRE project, and the RISER team supported the WIFIRE funding proposal.

The RISER project officially started on 16th September 2013. Our sincere thanks to everyone who helped and worked with us in achieving this first milestone.