The disruption of business caused by a wide-spread disaster such as a hurricane or an earthquake has a huge impact on the economy. A key reason that businesses fail to operate after a disaster is the lack of information on the availability of power and supplies, the road conditions, and so on. While there is no shortage of disaster planning or recovery toolkits and disaster information or news portals, currently there are no effective solutions that will help businesses to revive the business ecosystem interrupted by the disaster.The goal of this project is to design and develop data-driven solutions to address critical information exchange needs in disaster affected public-private networks and to achieve intelligent (context-aware and user-specific) information delivery, analysis, sharing, and collaboration among both private and public sector participants in disaster management. The project is conducting research on: (1) design and develop effective information integration and summarization methods to help users improve situational awareness; (2) design and develop intelligent information delivery techniques to help users quickly identify the information they need; and (3) design and develop automatic techniques for dynamic community generation. These research components constitute a holistic effort to effectively organize, discover, search and disseminate real-time disaster information and create a collaborative platform for preparedness and recovery that helps disaster impacted communities to better understand what the current disaster situation is and how the community is recovering. The developed techniques are designed to be all-hazard capable so that they can be used in hurricane, earthquake, terrorism, or other unanticipated disaster events, and they can also be applied to other information management domains. The project fosters the international collaboration between the Florida International University (FIU) team and the Japan team in disaster management and its broader impact is also aligned with the national goal of broadening participation in education. FIU is number one in the nation in awarding bachelor's and master's degrees to Hispanic students and its history of involving the participation of underrepresented groups in research efforts will be leveraged during the course of this project.
