Using Statistical Approaches to Model Natural Disasters

Behavioral Responses to Natural Disasters

Catastrophic events can dramatically alter existing social and economic relationships. The consequences can be long-lasting and give rise to heterogeneity of behavior across populations. We investigate the impact of a large negative shock on altruism, trust and reciprocity in 30 small Honduran communities diversely affected by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. We conduct a survey of communities and beha...

Natural Disasters

A Survey on Statistical Approaches to Natural Language Processing

This survey attempts to catch up with the recent increasing interests in statistical approach to natural language processing based on large corpora. First of all, a historical overview traces back to 1950s when Noam Chomsky proposed his phrase structure transformation grammar and rejected the Markov process natural language modeling. With the development of large corpora and language modeling i...

Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to Intelligently Sharing Large-Volumes of Real-Time Sensor Data During Natural Disasters

We describe our knowledge-based service architecture for multi-risk environmental decision-support, capable of handling geo-distributed heterogeneous real-time data sources. Data sources include tide gauges, buoys, seismic sensors, satellites, earthquake alerts, Web 2.0 feeds to crowd source 'unconventional' measurements and simulations of Tsunami wave propagation. Our system of systems multi-b...

Epidemics after Natural Disasters

The relationship between natural disasters and communicable diseases is frequently misconstrued. The risk for outbreaks is often presumed to be very high in the chaos that follows natural disasters, a fear likely derived from a perceived association between dead bodies and epidemics. However, the risk factors for outbreaks after disasters are associated primarily with population displacement. T...