Abstract: Multimedia delivery systems and protocols usually assume end-to-end connections and low delivery delays between multimedia sources and consumers. However, neither of these two properties can always be achieved in hastily formed networks for emergency response operations. In particular, disruptions may break end-to-end connections, which makes it impossible to deliver multimedia content instantly. This work presents a multimedia delivery system that can operate in disrupted networks and hence may help improve the situational awareness in emergency response operations. The multimedia delivery system is based on HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) and uses a modified version of HTTP which is able to deliver data in partitioned networks. The multimedia delivery system is evaluated in a realistic emergency response scenario.

Abstract: BRIDGE is a European collaborative project established within the Security Research sector of the European Commission. The basic goal of BRIDGE is to contribute to the safety of citizens by developing technical and organisational solutions that improve crisis and emergency management in EU member states. A (middleware) platform is being developed that is to provide technical support for multi-agency collaboration in large-scale emergency relief efforts. Several tools and software systems are being implemented and tested to support first responders in their efforts. Beyond technical considerations, organisational measures are being explored to ensure interoperability and cooperation among involved parties; social, ethical and legal issues are being investigated as well. A focus of the project is to demonstrate and validate its results in the course of real-world emergency response exercises. Since most of the BRIDGE work is beyond the scope of this e-letter on social networking, only a brief overview of the BRIDGE goals and work will be given. However, one thread of work is relevant in the context of social networking and deserves to be covered more closely: automatic detection of notable sub-events of a crisis from social networks. This activity makes use of crisis-related information coming from citizens via social networks and thus contributes to building an improved operational picture in a crisis situation and to better planning and performing crisis response tasks.

Abstract: Emergency response operations are a promising application area for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Most existing MANET routing protocols assume that an end-toend path between source and destination can be established. However, this assumption may not hold in a hastily formed network established during an emergency response. This paper evaluates a store-and-forward mechanism for proactive routing protocols to mitigate the effects of network disruptions. The mechanism is integrated into two routing protocols. The modified protocols are evaluated in an emergency response scenario that includes a disaster area mobility model and a wireless obstacle model. The scenario represents a realistic first responder operation after an incident in a chemical facility. The evaluation results show that networks for disaster responses benefit from the modified routing protocols.

Abstract: Communication networks for emergency response operations have to operate in harsh environments. As fixed infrastructures may be unavailable (e.g., they are destroyed or overloaded), mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are a promising solution to establish communication for emergency response operations. However, networks for emergency responses may provide diverse connectivity characteristics which imposes some challenges, especially on routing. Routing protocols need to take transmission errors, node failures and even the partitioning of the network into account. Thus, there is a need for routing algorithms that provide mechanisms from Delay or Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) in order to cope with network disruptions but at the same time are as efficient as MANET routing schemes in order to preserve network resources. This paper reviews several hybrid MANET-DTN routing schemes that can be found in the literature. Additionally, the paper evaluates a realistic emergency response scenario and shows that MANET-DTN routing schemes have the potential to improve network performance as the resulting network is diverse in terms of connectivity. In particular, the network provides well-connected regions whereas other parts are only intermittently connected.

Abstract: Social media offers an opportunity for emergency management to identify issues that need immediate reaction. To support the effective use of social media, an analysis approach is needed to identify crisis-related hotspots. We consider in this investigation the analysis of social media (i.e., Twitter, Flickr and YouTube) to support emergency management by identifying sub-events. Sub-events are significant hotspots that are of importance for emergency management tasks. Aiming at sub-event detection, recognition and tracking, the data is processed online in real-time. We introduce an incremental feature selection mechanism to identify meaningful terms and use an online clustering algorithm to uncover sub-events on-the-fly. Initial experiments are based on tweets enriched with Flickr and YouTube data collected during Hurricane Sandy. They show the potential of the proposed approach to monitor sub-events for real-world emergency situations.

Abstract: The design of interactive systems, especially in distributed research projects, is a challenging process in which many concepts are developed with successful outcomes but also with dissatisfying results. In order to structure and relay knowledge about good or bad approaches, design patterns are a well-known instrument in research and development. Due to the condition that a design pattern must be easy to read, different stakeholders in the system engineering and design process are able to understand the described concepts without the need of specific expert knowledge . In distributed projects, application design knowledge may be scattered and documented in different manners. This means, before we can start formulating patterns, we need to discover and gather the available and partially concealed design knowledge. Since these fragments of knowledge may not always be accurately formulated for being used as design patterns, we seek for a collaborative method for collecting and formulating early findings together with established design knowledge. In this paper we present a concept of an evolutionary process for capturing, formulating, refining and validating design patterns. Our approach aims at involving as many stakeholders as possible in order to shape a pattern language over a project’s lifetime in a collaborative process allowing facile participation. We implement our approach in the scope of the EU research project BRIDGE that aims at supporting inter-agency collaboration during emergency response. We close with a discussion of the current state and envisioned next steps in order to foster our considerations.

Abstract: We evaluate the performance of several routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) in an emergency response scenario. The simulated scenario uses a disaster area mobility model and a wireless shadowing model to represent realistic first responder movements in a hybrid indoor/outdoor environment. The resulting scenario imposes some challenges on the MANET routing protocols such as intermittent connectivity and network partitions. The simulation results show that nodes have diverse connectivity characteristics which are challenging for state-of-the-art MANET routing protocols.

Abstract: Social media are becoming an important instrument for supporting crisis management, due to their broad acceptance and the intensive usage of mobile devices for accessing them. Social platforms facilitate collaboration among the public during a crisis and also support after-the-fact analysis. Thus, social media are useful for the processes of understanding, learning, and decision making. In particular, having information from social networks in a suitable, ideally summarized, form can speed up such processes. The present study relies on Flickr and YouTube as social media and aims at automatically identifying individual sub-events within a crisis situation. The study applies a two-phase clustering approach to detect those sub-events. The first phase uses geo-referenced data to locate a sub-event, while the second phase uses the natural language descriptions of pictures and videos to further identify the ”what-about” of those sub-events. The results show high potential of this social media-based clustering approach for detecting crisis-related sub-events.

Abstract: Social networks give the opportunity to gather and share knowledge about a situation of relevance. This so called user-generated content is getting increasingly important during crisis management. It facilitates the collaboration with citizens or parties involved from the very beginning of the crisis. The information captured in form of images, text or videos is a valuable source of identifying sub-events of a crisis. In this study, we use metadata of images and videos collected from Flickr and YouTube to extract sub-events in crisis situations. We investigate the suitability of clustering techniques to detect sub-events. In particular two algorithms are evaluated on several data sets related to crisis situations. The results show the high potential of the approach proposed.

Abstract: Emergency management is about assessing critical situations, followed by decision making as a key step. Clearly, information is crucial in this two-step process. The technology of social (multi)media turns out to be an interesting source for collecting information about an emergency situation. In particular, situational information can be captured in form of pictures, videos, or text messages. The present paper investigates the application of multimedia metadata to identify the set of sub-events related to an emergency situation. The used metadata is compiled from Flickr and YouTube during an emergency situation, where the identification of the events relies on clustering. Initial results presented in this paper show how social media data can be used to detect different sub-events in a critical situation.