Currently various countries in South-East Asia, including India, are facing disaster due to Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES), which is primarily caused by Japanese Encephalitis Virus (JEV). A dirty environment and a lack of awareness about the risks associated with mosquito bites may be one of the reasons of the outbreak. Japanese encephalitis is a lethal neuroviral infection for which there i...

Over five years after the “triple disaster” of an earthquake, a tsunami, and the subsequent nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant that devastated Japan’s Tohoku region on March 11th, 2011, reconstruction is still progressing slowly. The difficulties are unprecedented and vast in scope: over 400 communities in 62 municipalities are affected in six different prefectures, along hun...

The first objective towards the effective use of microblogging services such as Twitter for situational awareness during the emerging disasters is discovery of the disaster-related postings. Given the wide range of possible disasters, using a pre-selected set of disaster-related keywords for the discovery is suboptimal. An alternative that we focus on in this work is to train a classifier using...

Improving public awareness through education has been recognized widely as a basis for reducing the risk of disasters. Some of the first disaster just-in-time (JIT) education modules were built within 3-6 days after the south Asia tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the Bam, Pakistan, and Indonesia earthquakes through a Supercourse. Web monitoring showed that visitors represented a wide spectrum of...

The wealth of environmental problems, plaguing us globally, requires special attention, largely due to the frequent indifference of citizens in the environmental decision-making process. Young people, as the future generation of decision makers, should receive proper education to prevent further environmental degradation. A summative international analysis of how the media framed when reporting...

The CSIRO ICT Centre’s Information Engineering Laboratory has been involved in a number of emergency management related projects over the last four years. In these projects we have applied our software engineering expertise in the areas of web technologies, user interfaces and databases along with research capability in machine learning, distributed systems, text processing and data stream mana...