Visual Analytics for Crisis Management track in ISCRAM2014
The 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management
May 18th-May 21st, 2014, Pennsylvania State University, USA
http://iscram2014.ist.psu.edu/node/31

Important Dates

- Full paper submissions - November 15th, 2013
- Work-in-progress papers, practitioner papers, posters, doctoral student colloquium papers - January 13th, 2014

Introduction to the track

Visual analytics techniques can offer fundamental support for Crisis Management, as they provide intuitive and powerful means to assess a situation and gather a quick understanding of emerging trends and interesting patterns in Big Data. Visually exploring and navigating different facets of large data can provide highly effective means to obtain understanding of the development of an evolving situation from multiple perspectives (spatial, temporal, topical etc…).

Whilst most Visual Analytics systems in the Crisis Management domain are built for and focused on professional users and practitioners, it is very important to create solutions that would empower citizens and communities in understanding an emergency situation and its evolution. Grounding in the theory of participatory design, we believe Visual Analytics techniques should be developed based on user requirements and active participation of user communities in the design, development and evaluation process. Only by following such a paradigm can we ensure that different requirements, rights of access and information needs are taken into account when designing interfaces to visualize data for crisis management. Ethics and privacy implications of serving such different communities should also be considered while developing solutions.

Keeping with the theme of this year’s conference on empowering citizens and communities, we are especially interested in work that will investigate how Visual Analytics can produce intuitive and engaging systems for practitioners, citizens and communities, respecting differing roles and information needs. Practical experiences describing use cases, user studies or evaluations of Visual Analytics with communities and citizens are particularly welcome.

Track topics
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• User requirements for Visual Analytics: Citizens vs. Practitioners
• Real-time data analysis and visualisation
• Presenting dynamic, evolving, unknown datasets
• Privacy, Ethics and Trust in visualizing information for different user communities
• Supporting exploration across crisis-related datasets
• Trends, pattern discovery, and visualization of results
• Crisis Management use-cases for Visual Analytics
• Evaluation of interactive visual interfaces in crisis scenarios
• Geovisual analytics for large scale dynamic data


Track Chair and Co-Chairs

Dr Vitaveska Lanfranchi is a Senior Research Fellow in the OAK Group. Her research field concerns Human Computer Interaction with a focus on supporting, gathering and sharing of knowledge between individuals. She has chaired a track on Visual Analytics for Crisis Management and has run the tutorial on Visual Analytics with Social Media for Crisis Management at Iscram2013. She was chair of the SMILE2013 (Social Media and Linked Data for Emergency Response) workshop, co-located with the 10th Extended Semantic Web Conference - May 26-30, 2013 at Montpellier, France. Dr. Lanfranchi is the Scientific Deputy Director for co-participation of WeSenseIt, a EU FP7 project on Citizens Observatories of Water. Dr. Lanfranchi is an ISCRAM member and will be attending the conference to moderate the session.

Mr. Suvodeep Mazumdar is a Research Associate in the OAK Group, currently writing up his PhD thesis. His field of research concerns Human Computer Interaction and Information Visualisation for knowledge management in large organizations and the social web. He has an extensive experience in iterative user centered design and evaluation of information visualisation systems. He has chaired a track on Visual Analytics for Crisis Management and has run the tutorial on Visual Analytics with Social Media for Crisis Management at Iscram2013. He was chair of the SMILE2013 (Social Media and Linked Data for Emergency Response) workshop, co-located with the 10th Extended Semantic Web Conference - May 26-30, 2013 at Montpellier, France.

Dr Tomi Kauppinen is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Media Technology at the Aalto University School of Science in Finland. Dr. Kauppinen is an elected co-chair of the W3C Emergency Information Community Group. He co-chaired the International Workshops on Linked Science 2011, 2012 and 2013 at the International Semantic Web Conferences, the track on Interoperability and Semantics of the Geoinformatik 2011 conference, and led the breakout session for Vocabularies for Science at Science Online London 2011 organized by Nature. He was also an organizer of the Workshop on GIScience in the Big Data Age 2012 (GIBDA2012). He was an invited speaker at the SMILE2013 (Social Media and Linked Data for Emergency Response) workshop, co-located with the 10th Extended Semantic Web Conference - May 26-30, 2013 at Montpellier, France.

Dr Justine Blanford is a Research Associate at the GeoVISTA Center in the Department of Geography at The Pennsylvania State University. She is a GIS specialist/analyst with over 15 years experience in both academic and non-academic environments throughout the world (North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa). Her current research interests include using GIS and spatial analysis to investigate spatial and temporal phenomena particularly the ecology of disease, investigating connectivity between locations and for the management and monitoring of the environment.

Please do not hesitate to contact the chairs for more information:

Dr. Vitaveska Lanfranchi*
OAK Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK
v.lanfranchi@dcs.shef.ac.uk

Mr. Suvodeep Mazumdar
OAK Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, UK
s.mazumdar@dcs.shef.ac.uk

Dr Tomi Kauppinen
Department of Media Technology Aalto University School of Science, Finland.
tomi.kauppinen@aalto.fi

Dr. Justine Blanford
GeoVISTA Center, Geography Department
The Pennsylvania State University, USA
jib18@psu.edu