Themes & Tracks

TRACK TITLE

Understanding Risk, Risk Reduction, Consequences and Forecasting

TRACK KEYWORDS: Planning, Emergency Plans, Foresight, Preparedness, Forecasting, Risk Analysis, Course of Action, Delphi, Vulnerability, Resilience, Business Continuity, Mitigation, Critical Infrastructures.

OBJECTIVE OF THE TRACK:

Anything that occurred in any phase of Emergency Management (planning, response, and recovery) that was unexpected and had to be dealt with. It is hoped that we will see useful examples of the need for creativity in dealing with emergencies, surprises, and unknowns.   Also, being aware of difficulties that occur because of the lack of collaboration across many different organizations in dealing with emergency situations.

TRACK DESCRIPTION:

We are interested in any approaches or methodologies for Planning, Foresight, and Risk analysis that would aid in the improvement of any Emergency Preparedness or Management Process.  This would include the integration of the results into other phases such as mitigation, detection, evaluation, response, and recovery.  Of particular interest are improved methods and ways to integrate volunteer individuals, decision makers, civilian, responders and local organizations into planning, foresight and/or risk analysis activities.  This includes planning for adding these participatory resources to any phase of Emergency Preparedness and Management.  Case studies are very welcome provided they contain insights for potential improvements in any aspects of planning or foresight in Emergency Management.  Improving the effectiveness of collaborative planning, resiliency, and actual collaboration among the many diverse organizations involved in emergency situations is also a valid topic.  In this sense, new forecasting approaches for anticipating and analyzing potential cascading effects and supporting multi-risk analysis in crisis situations will be very welcomed.  These methodological efforts will be especially adequate for the subject of the track when they integrate both quantitative and qualitative data and are aimed at improving the emergency planning process.

TRACK EXAMPLE TOPICS:

  • Mitigation options in Planning
  • Foresight/Forecasting Methods and Systems
  • Elicitation and analysis of risk information
  • Determining and estimating future threats
  • Use of Information systems for predicting risks
  • Forecasting methods for analyzing cascading effects in crisis situations
  • Quantitative and qualitative data integration for supporting Risk Analysis
  • Planning of new systems and methodologies
  • Scenario generation methods as planning and/or training tools
  • Foresight, Planning, and Risk Analysis integration
  • Citizen Participation into Emergency Planning Activities

TRACK CO-CHAIRS:

Victor Amadeo Banuls Silvera - Coordinating Track Co-Chair
 Pablo de Olavide University, Spain
[email protected]

Murray Turoff
New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
[email protected]

Richard Oloruntaba
University of Newcastle, Australia
[email protected]

victorB

Victor A. Bañuls

Victor A. Bañuls is Associate Professor of Management Information Systems at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO) at Seville,Spain. He has also served as visiting research scholar at the UFRJ,Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); CIEM,Agder, Norway; New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, USA; and Tilburg University,Tilburg, The Netherlands. His research has been published in journals, including Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Technovation, EAAI, IEEE SMC, and Futures, among others); he is also the editor of two books. He is the chair of several postgraduate programs, including an Executive Master program on Integrated Management Systems and an Executive Security Management program. His current research efforts are focused on foresight and emergency management, e-learning, management science, and information systems assessment. Dr. Bañuls is co-founder and Research Director of the safety engineering company, MSIG, and assessor of the Regional Spanish Government of Andalusia in Security Policy. He has been co-chair of the track “Foresight, Planning and Risk Analysis in Emergency Management” at the ISCRAM conference since 2010; he is a member of the board of ISCRAM and chair of the Publications and Academic Standards Committee since 2014; and he recently became Co-Editor in Chief of the International Journal of ISCRAM. 

Murray Turoff

Murray Turoff

Murray Turoff is responsible for the design of EMISARI, the very first asynchronous collaborative system in 1971 in the Office of Emergency Preparedness.  It was used by 300-400 professionals to monitor and impose the 1971 Wage Price Freeze.  From that time until around 1985 it was used as an Emergency Management Information System by the U.S. government.  Professor Turoff moved to NJIT in 1973 and began a long term research and development program with Starr Roxanne Hiltz in the development of the first Social Network system, called EIES.  It was devoted to tailoring communications to the nature of the problem or task groups were dealing with and the nature of the group.  In 1978 they published a prize winning (reprinted in 1993 by MIT press) book called “The Network Nation” that largely predicted todays Internet.  In 2004, Professor Turoff turned his attention back to Emergency Management Information Systems and published an award winning paper (i.e. best engineering communications publication in 2004) on how they should be designed, extrapolated from the early EMISARI effort.  Since that time, he continues to be very active in research and publications associated with Emergency Management and collaborative systems.

Richard Oloruntoba

Richard Oloruntoba

Richard Oloruntoba, PhD (Newcastle, Australia). Richard is a Senior Lecturer in the Newcastle Business School, Australia. He has published over 45 refereed articles and book chapters in the area of disaster management, humanitarian operations and humanitarian logistics. He has been a Visiting Scholar at W. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (2015)  and Humanitarian Logistics & Supply Chain Management Institute (Humlog) at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland (2015). He is an International Research Fellow in the Humanitarian Innovation Initiative at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University USA.  He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of International Journal of Physical Distribution and  Logistics  Management (IJPDLM) and the Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management  (JHLSCM). His research has been used in the training of logistics staff by Oxfam UK and Emergency Management Queensland. Richard has served on the board of the Migrant Resource Council, Queensland, and has been awarded the DB Schenker Award for Outstanding Research in Logistics in 2014; and the Highly Commended Thesis Award in the Emerald/European Fund for Management Development Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards 2013. He is an active emergency first responder volunteer with the New South Wales State Emergency Services.