Conventional and non-conventional emergencies are among the most important safety security concerns of new millennium. Nuclear power research plants, high-energy particle accelerators, radioactive substances for industrial medical uses all considered credible sources threats both in warfare terror scenarios. Estimates potential radiation releases contamination related to these therefore essenti...

The efficiency and speed with which first responders, paramedics, and emergency physicians respond to an event caused by the release of a chemical is an important concern in all modern cities worldwide. A system for the initial triage and decontamination of victims of a chemical release was developed using colored clothes pegs of the following seven colors: red, yellow, green, black, white, and...

In most of today’s emergency scenarios information plays a crucial role. Therefore, information has to be constantly collected and shared among all rescue team members and this requires new innovative technologies. In this paper a classification of emergency scenarios is presented, describing their special characteristics and common strategies employed by rescue units to handle them. Based on i...

The 2014-2016 Ebola virus disease epidemic in West Africa highlighted challenges faced by the global response to a large public health emergency. Consequently, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established the Global Rapid Response Team (GRRT) to strengthen emergency response capacity to global health threats, thereby ensuring global health security. Dedicated GRRT staff can be ...

We examine the challenge of coupling applications to real-time data sources in a Grid environment. Such problems are important to the emerging field of Grid-based emergency planning and crisis response, in which realtime data sources must be coupled to modeling applications to provide timely forecasting to emergency planners and responders. In this paper we present a Grid-based scripting workfl...

In the face of crises and risks, emergency responders are often faced with challenges in terms of reaching audiences in treacherous locations, or that are unreachable due to infrastructure failure. Social robots offer one solution for delivering information cornering risks under these circumstances. An exploratory study examined the responses of individuals to risk messages disseminated through...

Concept mapping has been used in multiple research domains for a variety of purposes such as brainstorming, knowledge elicitation, student testing and evaluation. Our work has applied the technique with pilots, emergency managers, emergency responders, and image analysts. Indeed, concept mapping has proven to be valuable both as an end state to represent and in turn understand knowledge, as wel...

Emergency responses require the coordination of first responders to assess the condition of victims, stabilize their condition, and transport them to hospitals based on the severity of their injuries. WIISARD is a system designed to facilitate the collection of medical information and its reliable dissemination during emergency responses. A key challenge in WIISARD is to deliver data with high ...

We run the risk that terrorists will decide to detonate an explosive device laced with radioactive materials (a radiological dispersal device, or RDD). If such an attack occurs, it is unlikely that the affected population or emergency responders would be exposed to high levels of external radiation, although airborne radionuclides may present a health risk under some circumstances. However, the...