Special Issue on AI for Disaster Management and Resilience

In recent years, there have been an increasing number of large-scale crises, such as natural disasters or armed attacks, that have had major effect on individual lives and infrastructure, and have caused the devastation to communities. During these mass emergencies, victims, responders, and volunteers increasingly use social media and mobile devices to provide real-time situation updates, i.e., reports on damage, or request and offer help. This has generated vast volumes of crisis data in different forms and from different sources. There are a number of challenges associated with near-real-time processing of vast volumes of information in a way that makes sense for people directly affected, for volunteer organizations, and for official emergency response agencies. There is a growing need for developing new AI techniques that process large-scale crisis data to gain a “big picture” of an emergency, detect and predict how a disaster could develop, analyze the impact of disasters and the effect of negative externalities in a cyber-physical society, and assist in disaster response and resource allocation. These AI techniques can allow better preparation for emergency situations, help save lives, limit economic impact, provide effective disaster relief, and make communities stronger and more resilient.

This special issue is to call for research initiatives toward the next generation disaster management that leverage AI to strengthen disaster resilience at all levels of society in the new age of mass emergencies. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

harnessing big data from the Web or Social Web to facilitate disaster and risk management
emergency- or disaster-related data mining and knowledge management methodologies
extracting actionable insights from crisis data to support decision making
integrating community-provided data with data from official sources
digital volunteering and all forms of citizen participation in disaster response
analyzing and/or establishing trust in local and global communities
understanding and/or designing socio-technical systems in mass emergencies
building resilience to disasters through the Internet of Things and ubiquitous intelligence
successful applications of disaster management and response systems
fairness, accountability, and transparency of AI systems for emergency/disaster response

Submission Guidelines

The word limit of submissions is between 3,000 and 5,400 words (counting a standard figure or table as 200 words) and should follow IEEE Intelligent Systems style and presentation guidelines (www.computer.org/intelligent/author). All submissions will be peer-reviewed following standard journal practices. The manuscripts cannot have been published or be currently submitted for publication elsewhere.

We strongly encourage submissions that include audio, video, and community content, which will be featured on the IEEE Computer Society website along with the accepted papers.

Please submit your article using the online manuscript submission service at
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee. When uploading your article, select the appropriate special-issue title under the category “Manuscript Type.” Also include complete contact information for all authors. If you have any questions about submitting your article, contact the peer review coordinator at isystems@computer.org.

Important Dates

Submission: November 15, 2018
Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2019

Guest Editors

Yu-Ru Lin (yurulin@pitt.edu), University of Pittsburgh, USA
Carlos Castillo (chato@acm.org), Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
Jie Yin (jie.yin@sydney.edu.au), The University of Sydney, Australia

Questions?

For general information about the special issue, contact Yu-Ru Lin (include the keyword “Intelligent Systems AI & Disaster” in the subject line) at yurulin@pitt.edu.
For general author guidelines, see www.computer.org/intelligent/author.
For submission details, see intelligent@computer.org.
To submit an article, go to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/is-cs (log in and then select “Special Issue on AI & Disaster”).