A State of the Art Assessment of Research on Information Systems in Crisis Response and Management

This talk examines new technologies in ICT for crisis and emergency management. I will explore how far we have come in this domain, where we currently are, and what technological and social challenges lay ahead for us. From the early focus on communication technologies in the 1850s we are now poised on the brink of a bright new future. Drones (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned marine vehicles (UMVs), are becoming our “digital responders”. Advances in augmented reality, wearables, and computer-based simulation are impacting training, search and rescue and policy development, etc. Behind much of this technological explosion lie new advances in artificial intelligence.  Yet somehow the full potential of these technologies are not being realised worldwide; there is a gap between what is currently used “on the ground” and what is fully possible. I will look at the some of the main challenges that are preventing us from realising the full potential of these technologies and suggest possible ways to overcome them.

Biography:

Julie Dugdale is an Associate Professor at University Grenoble Alps, France and leader of the MAGMA Multi-Agent Systems research team, part of the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG). She is also been an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of Agder, Norway where she worked in the Centre for Integrated Emergency Management (CIEM). She also serves on the IFIP Domain Committee on IT in Disaster Risk Reduction. She was awarded her HDR (habilitation) from University Joseph Fourrier in 2013, concerning « Human behaviour modelling in complex socio-technical systems – an agent based approach ». She obtained her PhD in 1994 from the University of Buckingham, UK. She came to France 1998 from an Associate Professor post at De Montfort University, UK. Before joining the MAGMA team in 2006, she worked for 3 years in the Human-Machine Interaction team at LIG, and for 5 years in a Cognitive Engineering Team at Computer Science Research Institute in Toulouse.

Her work concerns human behaviour modelling and simulation of crisis and emergency situations. She has been involved in the area of emergency and crisis management since 1998 and over the years has published over 100 articles on this topic. She is also an editorial board member of several journals concerning agent technologies, information systems and crisis management, and artificial intelligence. She takes a strong multi-disciplinary approach to her work, merging the social sciences (cognition, geography, sociology) with her primary domain of computer science. This is in addition to working closely with crisis managers and practitioners.

She became involved with the ISCRAM community since its inception in 2004. Since then she has been heavily engaged with the ISCRAM community: Chair/Co-Chair of the ISCRAM Doctoral Colloquium 2007, 2009, 2012; Co-Chair of the Intelligent Systems ISCRAM track 2007, 2008, 2008, 2012, 2013, and other 2 other tracks in 2005, 2006; ISCRAM Program Chair 2011, Lisbon, Portugal; Conference Co-Chair ISCRAM Med 2015, 2016, 2017; In 2010 she was very proud to receive the ISCRAM Distinguished Service Award for outstanding support to the ISCRAM Community. In 2011 she was elected to the ISCRAM Board of Directors, then she became ISCRAM Vice President and finally ISCRAM President; a role which she served until 2017.