New Directions in Disaster and Emergency Situation Management: Technology and Applications

Speaker:	Dr. Gabriel Jakobson
 		Chief Scientist
		Altusys Corporation

Title:		"New Directions in Disaster and Emergency
		 Situation Management: Technology and Applications"

Date:		Tuesday, 24 Nov 2009

Time:		4:30pm-5:30pm

Venue:		Lecture Theater H (near lifts 27/28)

Abstract:

Natural and human-made disasters create unparalleled challenges to the
response, relief and recovery operations. Disaster Situation Management
(DSM) is a complex multi-dimensional process involving a large number of
inter-operating entities (teams of humans and systems) and is affected by
various social, medical, geographical, psychological, political, and
technological factors. From the information technology viewpoint the DSM
processes can be hindered by lack of adequate, comprehensive and timely
information; the presence of conflicting goals, policies, and priorities;
lack of effective coordination between different rescue operations
augmented with inability of many units to act autonomously. Consequently
there are important research issues to improve the current methods and
algorithms of DSM.During the last decade significant progress was made in
the development and deployment of integrated disaster information
monitoring systems, including weather, earthquake, fire, chemical,
radiological and biological activity monitoring systems. The introduction
of GPS and GIS added significant functionality to the disaster monitoring
and emergency team dispatching systems. In recent years the progress in
miniature low-powered sensors and sensor networks, unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs), geo-spatial information systems, wireless broadband
communications, and new emerging solutions of cognitive information
processing, situation management, distributed computing, and
agent-technologies are opening opportunities for new solutions for DSM.

Many real-time operations of DSM are characterized by significant number
of inter-acting operational components, high mobility of the components,
increasing dynamic and often hardly predictable situations. The
operational characteristics and goals set for DSM require comprehensive
and effective methods of understanding, planning and execution of DSM.
Situation Management (SM) is as a synergistic goal-directed process of
situation awareness, situation control, and prediction of potential future
situations. The essential components of SM include sensing and
intelligence gathering, information fusion and event correlation,
modelling of the domain entities and their inter-relations, detecting and
reasoning about the situations, threat situation prediction, and action
planning affecting the situations. This presentation gives an overview of
the concepts and technology of situation management, presents practical
solutions and systems how to architect and deploy situation management
systems, and analyses several practical applications and their
effectiveness.


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Biography:

Dr. Gabriel Jakobson is the Chief Scientist at Altusys Corp., a consulting
firm specializing in the development of intelligent Situation Management
technologies for defence, cyber security and disaster situation management
applications. During his more than 20 years tenure at Verizon (formerly
GTE) he had increasing responsibilities of leading advanced database,
expert systems, artificial intelligence, and telecommunication network
management programs. Prior to that he was Senior Researcher at Institute
of Cybernetics, Tallinn, Estonia conducting research on knowledge-based
systems. Dr. Jakobson has authored over 100 technical publications, has
awarded 4 US patents on innovative real-time event correlation methods,
and has 4 US patents pending on situation management. He received PhD
degree in Computer Science from the Institute of Cybernetics, Estonia.

Dr. Jakobson holds the honorary degree of Doctor Honorius Causa from the
Tallinn Technical University, Estonia, and is Distinguished IEEE ComSoc
Lecturer. He has extensively travelled giving lectures and tutorials in
Latin America, Europe, Asia and Australia. He is the chair of the Workshop
on Situation Management SIMA held in-conjunction with MILCOM 2005-2009,
chair of the Special Sessions on Situation Management at International
Conference of Information Fusion 2006-2008, TPC co-chair of the Symposium
on Selected Areas of Communication at ICC 2009 and General Chair of the
International Conferences of Enterprise Networking and Services (EntNet)
2002-2007. Dr. Jakobson is the vice-chair of the Tactical Communications
and Operations Technical Committee of IEEE ComSoc, chair of the IEEE
ComSoc Sub-Committee on Situation Management, IEEE ComSoc Board member and
Director of North America Region of ComSoc.