Making sense of the current state of an emergency and of the response to it is vital if appropriate decisions are to be made. This task involves the acquisition, interpretation and management of information. In this paper we present an integrated system that applies recent ideas and technologies from the fields of Artificial Intelligence and semantic web research to support senseand decision-making at the tactical response level, and demonstrate it with reference to a hypothetical large-scale emergency scenario. We offer no end-user evaluation of this system; rather, we intend that it should serve as a visionary demonstration of the potential of these technologies for emergency response.

This paper concerns the use of virtual worlds alongside web technologies for on-line collaborative activities. The potential of this combination of technologies lies in the complementary notions of presence that these technologies offer their users. After discussing the nature of synchronous and asynchronous distributed collaboration, we describe a virtual collaborative environment that has been developed for task-focused communities and support to them through specific problem-solving episodes. This environment has been subject to experiments involving the development and provision of expert advice in the context of the response to a large-scale emergency crisis.

Effective response to emergencies depends upon the availability of accurate and focused information. The goal of the FireGrid project is to provide an architecture by which the results of computer models of physical phenomena can be made available to decision-makers leading the response to fire emergencies in the built environment. In this paper we discuss the application of a number of AI techniques in the development of FireGrid systems, and include algorithms developed for reasoning about dynamic situations. It is intended that this paper will be of technical interest to those who have to construct agents that are able to reason about the complexities of the real world, and of more general appeal to those interested in the ontological and representational commitments and compromises that underlie this reasoning.

We are working on support for distributed collaboration for the Dismounted Incident Collaboration Environment (DICE). The overall DICE project at the US Army Research Lab’s Human Research & Engineering Directorate is seeking to give support to offer best advice and specialist assistance when soldiers are injured and are being treated. Distributed collaboration, as required for the DICE community, is typical of the needs of many communities that work across national and organisational boundaries as in multi-national coalitions. This paper gives a summary of work in progress on the DICE project and its distributed collaboration experimentation.

Abstract : This paper concerns the use of new media technologies, including virtual worlds and web 2.0, for on-line collaborative activities, and specifically for the provision of expert advice about the response to large-scale crises. Internet technologies in general offer rich possibilities for interactions involving remote experts; however, the diversity, novelty and power of these technologies are such that to introduce them into problem-solving episodes without first developing a model of the nature of those episodes and the type of collaborative support they require, risks confusing and discouraging users. After a brief discussion of the nature of distributed collaboration and the implications this has for any technical support, we describe a virtual collaboration environment that has been developed to foster task-focused communities and support them through specific problem-solving episodes, and present some of the results of evaluation experiments.

This chapter concerns the use of virtual worlds and web 2.0 technologies for on-line collaborative activities. The potential of this combination of technologies lies in the complementary notions of presence that these technologies offer their users. After discussing this idea, the nature of distributed collaboration and the implications this has for any technical support, we describe a virtual collaborative environment that has been developed to foster task-focused communities and support them through specific problem-solving episodes. This environment has been subject to experiments involving the development and provision of expert advice in the context of the response to a large-scale crisis.

The FireGrid project aims to harness the potential of advanced forms of computation to support the response to large-scale emergencies (with an initial focus on the response to fires in the built environment). Computational models of physical phenomena are developed, and then deployed and computed on High Performance Computing resources to infer incident conditions by assimilating live sensor data from an emergency in real time—or, in the case of predictive models, faster-than-real time. The results of these models are then interpreted by a knowledge-based reasoning scheme to provide decision support information in appropriate terms for the emergency responder. These models are accessed over a Grid from an agent-based system, of which the human responders form an integral part. This paper proposes a novel FireGrid architecture, and describes the rationale behind this architecture and the research results of its application to a large-scale fire experiment.

The I-Room is a virtual environment intended to support a range of collaborative activities, especially those that involve sense making, deliberation, and decision making. The I-Room case studies described in this paper all employ virtual worlds technology to provide this interaction space and show how this can be augmented with external knowledge-based and intelligent systems.

This paper describes a system that supports the distributed development and deployment of Standard Operating Procedures. The system is based on popular, open-source wiki software for the SOP development, and the I-X task-centric agent framework for deployment. A preliminary evaluation using an SOP for virtual collaboration is described and shows the potential of the approach.

In this paper we describe the information-gathering problem which can be characterized as transforming large amounts of data obtained from sensors into accurate, concise, timely and meaningful information that can be used by decision makers faced with a specific task and a number of options for performing that task. The approach to this information-gathering problem as described here consists of three phases: data validation, data aggregation and abstraction, and information interpretation. Each of these phases will be described in general, and for each of these phases we describe techniques that are reasonably generic to be applicable in many domains, but domain specific knowledge will of course always be needed too.

Effective response to emergencies depends upon the availability of accurate and focused information. The goal of the FireGrid project is provide an architecture by which the results of computer models of physical phenomena can be made available to decision-makers in the context of fire emergencies in the built environment. A number of AI techniques have been applied in the development of this architecture, and are discussed in this paper. FireGrid: Intelligence for Emergency Responders Stephen Potter, Austin Tate and Gerhard Wickler Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, UK

An I-Room is an “intelligent room” which can act as a knowledge aid to support collaborative meetings and activities, especially when these involve sense-making about the current context, planning, considering options, and decision-making. The I-Room provides a generic technology basis for a wide range of potential collaborative applications and uses. It can provide a conduit for accessing intelligent systems and knowledge bases from collaborative interaction spaces such as virtual worlds. Applications to support a geographically dispersed cross-disciplinary team engaged in the creation of a multi-media video game product and to mixed-initiative whisky-tasting tutorials are described. I-Room: Applications of a Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction Austin Tate, Yun-Heh Chen-Burger, Jeff Dalton, Stephen Potter, David Richardson, Jussi Stader Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, UK

An I-Room is an “intelligent room” which can act as a knowledge aid to support collaborative meetings, especially those involving sense-making about the current context, planning and considering options, and decision-making. It can be used to provide an Emergency Response Virtual Collaboration Centre in a Virtual World. The I-Room will provide a generic technology basis for a wide range of potential collaborative applications and uses. As a specific application its potential use to support multi-national multi-agency operations by the Multinational Planning Augmentation Team (MPAT) is described.

This paper describes some of the lessons learned from the FireGrid project. It starts with a brief overview of the project. The discussion of the lessons learned that follows is intended for others attempting to develop a similar system, where sensor data is used to steer a super-real time simulation in order to generate predictions that will provide decision support for emergency responders.

Below is an excerpt of a recent article published by Engineering News Record describing recent efforts to rethink structural fire protection engineering for large, open-plan office spaces. 9/11 Blazes Debunk Code […]