IEEE International Workshop on
Collaborations in Emergency Response and Disaster Management (ERDM 2011)

As part of The 2011 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2011)
http://cts2011.cisedu.info/

May 23 - 27, 2011
The Sheraton University City Hotel
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submissions (Extended deadline): -------- February 15, 2011
Acceptance Notification: ---------------------- February 28, 2011
Camera Ready Papers and Registration Due: ----- March 8, 2011
Conference Dates: ---------------------------- May 23 - 27, 2011


Instructions for Authors:

You are invited to submit original and unpublished research works on above and other topics related to emergency respond and disaster management. Submitted papers must not have been published or simultaneously submitted elsewhere. Submit a PDF copy of your full manuscript via the Workshop paper submission site at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=erdm2011.?

Full papers (about 8 pages)
Short papers (4-6 pages)
Extended abstracts (2 pages).

Papers will be selected based on their originality, relevance, contributions, technical clarity and presentation. Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their papers will be registered and presented at the workshop. The proceedings is projected to be included in the IEEE Digital Library and indexed accordingly.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION
Disasters are events that cause dramatic losses of life and property and disrupt the normal functioning of the economy and society on a large scale. Disaster management is a multifaceted process aimed at minimizing the social and physical impact of these large-scale events. Emergency response seeks to contain the event and minimize loss of life and injuries (rescue), health impacts, and property loss. Examples of immediate response include search and rescue operations. Responding to disasters involves such information- and communication-intensive activities as planning and marshaling available resources and materiel, mobilizing and organizing sufficient skilled personnel, determining emergency situations and levels, deploying them with those resources to where they are needed, and finally coordinating their activities and services. Specific tasks include establishing connectivity with potential resource and service providers, authorizing the use of resources and coordinating their use into something akin to a supply chain, integrating information from diverse (including ad hoc) sources, reducing the volume of data to relevant information for recipients, directing ongoing operations based on an overall awareness of the situation, adjusting and altering prior plans and commitments based on the evolving situations, and supporting collaboration and distributed decision making.

This workshop on Collaborations in Emergency Response and Disaster Management ? to be held as part of the 2011 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2011) ? will focus on collaborative systems and technologies that support effective team work in crisis and emergency management. However, current information systems are rarely designed to support group work in emergency response situations. There is a need for establishing a long-term, interdisciplinary research agenda that aims to improve information technology support to collaborations in disaster management and emergency response.

Topics of Interest include (but are not limited to):
* Conceptualizing the roles of information technologies and services in collaborations during emergency response and disaster management
* Emergency and Disaster Prediction for smart environments
* Collaborative sense-making and information foraging
* Collaborative decision-making under stress, time pressure and inadequate resources
* Supporting collaborations in emergency operation centers (EOCs).
* Infra-structure, technologies and services for mediating same-time, different place collaboration communications among distributed crisis management teams and organizations
* Supporting collaborations among citizens (in disaster impacted area) through personal mobile computing devices and novel information services
* Social science aspects of Emergency Response and Disaster Management
* Collaborative information systems architectures, technologies, services or algorithms that address particular challenges in crisis management
* Collaborative virtual environment and emergency training for situation awareness
* Experiences in applying collaborative technologies to emergency responses or exercises
* Geospatial information technology and geocollaboration


Workshop Organizers

Hien Nam Le
Department of Telematics
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Norway
Email: hiennam@item.ntnu.no

Hong-Linh Truong
Distributed Systems Group
Institute of Information Systems
Vienna University of Technology
Austria
Email: truong@infosys.tuwien.ac.at

Massimo Mecella
Department of Computer and System Sciences
University of Rome - La Sapienza
Italy
Email: mecella@dis.uniroma1.it
Technical Program Committee:
Please see http://cts2011.cisedu.info/2-conference/workshops/workshop-10--erdm