D3.1.2. Final report on the use of emerging technologies in crisis situations

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This is the final version of Deliverable D3.1 of the COSMIC project, released as D3.1.2. It provides results in the analysis of emerging communication technologies in support of crisis management. New communication technologies and social media have greatly expanded the overall scope of communication in crisis management, because of several new synergetic factors, including: access to communication technology, richer communication modalities, communication occurring in public, and data exhaust. Therefore, the scope of emerging communication technologies, and social media and applications, encompasses: intentional acts of communication; unintentional acts of communication; handling information as its recipient; and accessing and analysing public information as a third party. We provide a list of 27 specific emerging technology areas and application areas that are relevant according to this scope. These include: citizen journalism, cloud, crowdsourcing, data mining, big data, decision support, open data, Internet of Things, wearable sensors and others. These are all examined and appraised for their possible role in social media aided crisis management. New and emerging technologies, which can generally offer significant help in combating crises, also entail a variety of risks, such as those to individuals’ privacy and sense of identity; the correct allocation of responsibility in evolving crises; the possibility of information overload; the potential of creating conflicts of interest among responders; and the general possibility of producing unintended, negative consequences even when the initial aim is crisis management. Aided by emerging technology areas, as analysed in the present document, social media are transforming many aspects of crisis management. They contribute to the openness, fairness and quickness of communication during a crisis and can be used in a variety of ways: making diagnoses of vulnerabilities in systems and infrastructures (in preparation for crises); facilitating and simplifying search and rescue missions (during a crisis); and enhancing control and community connectedness (including the recovery stages after a crisis). In addition to their use by individuals, social media are also being exploited in large crisis management projects, in a manner similar to those of NASA style “mission control centres”, for monitoring and responding to the generation of massive stream of media messages