Responding to natural or man-made disasters in a timely and effective manner can reduce deaths and injuries, contain or prevent secondary disasters, and reduce the resulting economic losses and social disruption. During a crisis, the normal rhythm of life is significantly disrupted and responding organizations confront grave uncertainties in making critical decisions. They typically need to gather situational information (e.g., state of the civil, transportation and information infrastructures) and information about available resources (e.g., medical facilities, rescue and law enforcement units). Clearly there is a strong correlation between the quality of these decisions and the accuracy, timeliness, and reliability of the information available to the decision-makers. The goal of this proposal is to radically transform the ability of responding organizations to gather, manage, use and disseminate information both within emergency response networks and to the general public. With more robust information systems, response can be prioritized, and focussed to activities that have the highest potential to save lives and property.

Such a radical transformation requires a multidisciplinary approach that recognizes that while information technology is paramount, a thorough understanding of how emergency organizations form and work together in crisis situations is vital to the solution. Based on this understanding, we propose a research program that consists of two interrelated research thrusts:

• Scalable and robust information technology solutions to facilitate access to the right information, by the right individuals and organizations, at the right time, and
• Social Science Research that investigates the distinctive nature of dynamic virtual organizations, information needs across organizational boundaries, and the social and cultural aspects of information sharing across organizations and individuals

The proposal brings together a research team with proven track record in various relevant areas of information technology, social sciences, organizational behavior, and disaster management and a community of first-responders (cities of LA, Irvine, and San Diego, County of LA and state of California). The multidisciplinary team will address the following challenges in the context of crisis response: (1) Enabling humans (rescue workers, observers) to become rich sources of vital crisis-related information. (2) Seamlessly collecting data from heterogeneous sources in highly dynamic disaster situations where the IT infrastructure may have partially failed. (3) Translating low-level noisy data into meaningful events useful for damage assessment and situation awareness. (4) Enabling seamless information sharing and collective decision-making across highly dynamic emergent virtual organizations. (5) Rapidly disseminating information in the form most useful to recipients while observing the fundamental limitations of the underlying communication and information technologies. The proposed testbed and validation platforms will be deployed in close partnership with first responders from the San Diego and Irvine Police departments as well as the California Office of Emergency Services in live environments and will help us evaluate the effectiveness of the research.