RESCUER · Reliable and Smart Crowdsourcing Solution for Emergency and Crisis Management - EU

Disasters occurring during large-scale events and in industrial areas may have a huge impact on human lives, property, and the environment. Fast reaction is vital in order to avoid physical damages as well as damages to the public image of the involved organisations. As a result several measures are taken and periodically bolstered to ensure effective and efficient emergency and crisis management. The use of a software system is among those measures, together with staff assignments to a command centre, trainings, and (virtual) simulation exercises.The main challenge for a command centre is to quickly obtain contextual information about the emergency situation in order to make the right decisions. Late decisions or decisions based on inaccurate information have a great potential for causing more damages. As mobile devices are widely used and in many cases connected to the Internet, crowdsourcing information and mobile technologies offer great potential for addressing this challenge. However, existing crowdsourcing information based platforms for emergency and crisis management present several shortcomings. In particular and more importantly, they are neither tailored for use in mobile devices nor for use close to the place of an incident, when people are still under stress. Moreover, there is a lack of resources for automatic analysis of the collected multimedia data.RESCUER aims at developing a smart and interoperable computer platform for using crowdsourcing information mashed up with open data to support emergency and crisis management. The RESCUER platform will be capable of 1) gathering crowdsourcing information in real-time by providing user interaction mechanisms especially developed to be used in emergency situations, 2) greatly improving situational awareness in a command centre in a timely manner, through novel multimedia data analysis methods and effective visualisation and manipulation mechanisms, and 3) semi-automatically providing official and accurate announcement of emergencies to the affected community and general public through an efficient approach for deriving specific documents from generic ones. Furthermore, RESCUER will support ad-hoc communication.Both European and Brazilian industries will benefit from the project results, several of which have the potential for becoming at least de facto standards. As industrial areas periodically simulate incidents for training purposes, the RESCUER platform can be experimentally validated before the Olympic Summer Games in 2016.