Government and Disaster Resilience

Minitrack Description

The 21st century has been termed “the century of disasters.” Worldwide, there were twice as many disasters and catastrophes in the first decade of this century as in the last decade of the 20th century. All continents are affected, both directly and indirectly. And the trend continues, fueled by climate change, demographic changes, and social dynamics. The serious challenges facing government in cities, regions, and nations of the world relate to acute shocks (such as forest fires, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics, and terrorist attacks) and chronic stresses (such as high unemployment, religious extremism, inefficient public transport systems, endemic violence, and chronic shortages of food and water).

Now, we are in the era to consider how to deal with these unexpected consequences, not only preventing it before it happens. In other words, we should develop a disaster-resilient community to adapt the society to this new world. This minitrack features government (national, regional, and municipal) roles in developing territory security and disaster resilience, since they are responsible for saving lives of citizens, coordinating relief operations with different organizations, and so on. In addition to this, roles of information systems and technologies to enhance disaster resilience and capability of the government are also essential to discuss.

We invite papers that deal with any aspect of the analysis, design, development, deployment, implementation, integration, operation, use, or evaluation of ICT for discussing government roles for disaster resilience.

Minitrack topics include, but are not limited to:

• Government’s role in building resilient communities
• International disaster response collaborations
• Disaster communications with government organizations
• Ground security / homeland security
• Citizen/Volunteers engagement to disaster responses by government organizations
• Antifragility of systems and territories/li>

More information on the minitrack chairs:

Mihoko Sakurai, Ph.D., is currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Agder (Norway), Department of information systems. Her academic background is Information Systems and Policy Design. She received her PhD from the Keio University’s Graduate School of Media and Governance in Japan. She has studied effective ways of using Information Communication Technology in Japan’s municipal governments. After the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, she conducted field research and designed information systems to enhance the handling of future and unexpected disasters, especially for municipalities which have to deliver disaster relief operations to their residents. She is also an affiliate of Keio University as a researcher. Currently she is working on the notion of resilience and how information systems can support this. Her works related to the earthquake won the best paper award at ITU Kaleidoscope conference (2013) and HICSS (2016). Her works also have been published in IEEE communications magazine, ICIS (International Conference on Information Systems), and ISCRAM (International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management).

Jose J. Gonzalez (dr.rer.nat., University of Kiel, Germany, dr.techn., Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway) has long experience as professor of ICT and information security at the University of Agder and as adjunct professor of information security at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology, both in Norway. He founded and directed from 2011-2014 the Centre for Integrated Emergency Management at the University of Agder, an interdisciplinary research centre with a strong representation in information systems, IT technology, and humanitarian science. Dr. Gonzalez has published in leading journals and conferences on system dynamics modeling, information security, critical infrastructure, organizational learning, and Interactive Training Environments. Many of these papers are the result of international cooperation involving an extensive network of German, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, and American partners. Among the most recent large-scale projects led and coordinated by Dr. Gonzalez are AMBASEC (funded by the Research Council of Norway and the Norwegian Oil Industry Association), dealing with incident response and handling in Integrated Operations in the oil and gas sector. Dr. Gonzalez also participated in the recent SEMPOC project, funded by the EU through the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection. Finally, Dr Gonzalez had a leading role in the development of the Smart Mature Resilience project, a 5.4 million USD project funded by the European Union that started June 2015. The project involves 13 partners (4 universities, 2 major non-profit organizations, and 7 European cities).

Frederick Benaben, Ph.D., is a full Professor in Information Systems for collaborative situations (43 years old, married, three children) at Ecole des Mines d'Albi-Carmaux (Toulouse University - Mines Telecom Institute), France. He received a M. Engineering (1998), a M. Sc. (1998), a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences (2001), a Qualification as Assistant-Professor (2003), an Habilitation as Research Director (2012) and a Qualification as Professor (2013). He is the Head of the IO research team (Interoperability of Organizations – 20 persons), lecturer, and researcher in the fields of Collaborative Networks and Information System Interoperability. Research activities concern:

• Covering abstraction layers of knowledge management: data (gathering from data sources), information (interpretation for automated or assisted modeling), and knowledge (exploitation for the management of the collaborative situations).
• Covering the life cycle of collaborations: define (design the model of the collaborative behavior), realize (orchestrate the collective workflows), and maintain (detect any unexpected situation and adapt the collaborative behavior accordingly).

The used approaches directly inherit from model-driven engineering. A generic model of collaborative situations (of all kinds) and exploitation mechanisms (model transformation) have been defined and are the roots of a lot of inheriting domain generic models and exploitation mechanisms. The main application domains of these research works are: preparation and response phases of crisis management, agility of the supply-chain for industry 4.0, interoperability of information systems, inter-modality in transportation for smart-city, and health care systems. The IO-suite of open source software has been implemented to support and illustrate the obtained research results: IO-DA (Design Assistant), IO-WA (Workflow Assistant), IO-TA (Tracking Assistant), and IO-GA (Governance Assistant). The used concepts and tools are model-driven engineering, data science, business process management, web-services, and cloud architecture.

During the last 10 years, he published 12 articles in international journals and more than 100 conference articles. He has supervised or directed 17 Ph.D., 10 M. Sc., and 9 post-doctoral positions. He has been involved in 12 collaborative funded projects (European/French 3 as coordinator for almost 3 million Euros funding), and he has been invited for 9 keynote speeches.