Understanding the Health Disaster: Research Design for the Response to the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak

International audience; The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the largest ever in history, affecting multiple countries and to this date, the World Health Organization has registered more than 6,500 deaths attributed to Ebola. The challenges arising from this outbreak to responders worldwide do not follow the standard characterisation or response patterns of natural sudden onset vs. conflict disasters. Rather, it is a medical emergency, which is intertwined with multiple challenges in the sectors decision-making, coordination, logistics and information management. In this paper, we present our research framework, which is based on desk research and initial interviews with responders. Th…

On the Nature of Information Management in Complex and Natural Disasters

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to present reflections on the nature of information management (IM) and its role and function to support coordination in one of the largest humanitarian crises of our time, the Syria crisis. Starting from general principles for humanitarian information management, we analyze the challenges that information managers face in conflict situations, when information is – more than anywhere else – a source of power and influence. This work outlines the interdependence of advocacy and operational information management, the sensitivity of information, and barriers to information sharing. The results are complex and highly interlaced information and coordination…

Session details: Data for good - disaster response and resilience

Improving situation awareness in crisis response teams

In responding to an emergency, the actions of emergency response teams critically depend upon the situation awareness the team members have acquired. Situation awareness, and the design of systems to support it, has been a focus in recent emergency management research. In this paper, we introduce two interventions to the core processes of information processing and information sharing in emergency response teams to analyze their effect on the teams' situation awareness: (1) we enrich raw incoming information by adding a summary of the information received, and (2) we channel all incoming information to a central coordinator who then decides upon further distribution within the team. The eff…

Exploring the future: Runtime scenario selection for complex and time-bound decisions

Abstract Scenarios are designed to support decision-makers in gaining a better understanding of the consequences of decisions. Despite their popularity in IT for Foresight, a major obstacle is the complexity of strategic decisions and the resulting multitude of scenarios. Therefore choices need to be made, which scenarios to fully work out, by which experts and in which level of detail. This paper presents an approach to support making these trade-offs between accuracy and resources spent by prioritising scenarios based on their significance for the decision even on the basis of incomplete information. This approach combines theoretical findings in decision theory with results that were eli…

Risk Accelerators in Disasters

Published version of a chapter in the book: Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07881-6_2 Modern societies are increasingly threatened by disasters that require rapid response through ad-hoc collaboration among a variety of actors and organizations. The complexity within and across today's societal, economic and environmental systems defies accurate predictions and assessments of damages, humanitarian needs, and the impact of aid. Yet, decision-makers need to plan, manage and execute aid response under conditions of high uncertainty while being prepared for further disruptions and failures. This paper argues tha…