On behalf of the ISCRAM 2023 Conference Committee, we take great pleasure in inviting you to submit a paper (core or WiP or Practitioner). We hope to welcome you to the Global ISCRAM 2023 conference in Omaha, NE (USA). We invite our academic and practioner colleagues to consider showcasing their work to a small, focused group of ISCRAM researchers and practitioners while enjoying Omaha hospitality.
Conference Vision
Our conference vision is to provide a high-quality conference experience while illustrating the human-scale experience that Midwestern cities in the USA provide. Our hope is to provide all delegates with this “human scale” experience in Omaha while celebrating its history and warm embrace of a sustainable and resilient future.
The conference committee is pleased to encourage authors to submit their contributions in all areas of relevance to ISCRAM and in particular contributions are solicited in the following thematic areas for ISCRAM 2023: Building Humanitarian Technologies for our Emerging Future/Building Resilient Societies. ISCRAM’s emphasis on the impact and role of ICT on our future as a humanity is the idea behind these themes. The Covid-19 pandemic, the Haiti challenges, the Ukraine war, climate change, Paskitani floods, Puero Rico Hurricane Fiona, and the Afghanistan refugee crisis have clearly illustrated that humanitarian crises have become increasingly complex and protracted needing innovative solutions. Whether this means the use of drones or the need for advanced analytics, information systems & technology has a role to play in addressing sustained humanitarian challenges.
The Covid-19 pandemic has also illustrated the need for building resilient societies that respond rapidly and effectively to health challenges and the associated economic consequences and adapt to be more responsive to future challenges. Around the world, digital technologies are driving high-impact interventions. Community and public health leaders are handling time-sensitive tasks and meet pressing needs with technologies that are affordable and inclusive, and don’t require much technical knowledge. Many Omaha nonprofits have dedicated resources for resiliency by supporting Omaha-area organizations serving communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19.
DETAILED CALL FOR PAPERS
The ISCRAM 2023 conference committee invites two broad categories of research papers:
- CoRe: Completed Research (from 4000 to 8000 words).
- WiP: Work In Progress (from 3000 to 6000 words).
CoRe papers are longer in length and describe completed research studies. WiP papers are shorter and meant to describe smaller, more focused research findings or research that is still in progress. Both of these paper types undergo a rigorous peer-review process and will be archived in the ISCRAM digital library.
For ISCRAM 2023 we also welcome practitioner contributions in two different forms as detailed in the practitioner engagement track below. While practitioners are also invited to submit a CoRe or WiP research paper, we recognize that an academic review process is often not appropriate for practitioner contributions. These authors may instead wish to submit a 500-3,000 word practitioner paper. Practitioner submissions will be reviewed according to relevance and ability to contribute to discussions rather than by standard academic peer review criteria. Accepted Practitioner submissions will also be included as extended abstracts in the conference proceedings.
IMPORTANT DATES: (Please refer to Dates and Deadlines for a comprehensive list of important dates).
- 20 September 2022 to
15 December 2022 15 January 2023 – Call for CoRe Paper Submission
- 20 September 2022 to
10 January 2023 February 20th, 2023 – Call for WiP Paper Submission
-
15 January 2023 February 8th, 2023 – Notification of acceptance/rejection of CoRe Paper
-
7 February 2023 March 1st, 2023 – The notification of acceptance/rejection of WiP Paper
- 31 March 2023 – Camera Ready WiPE, CoRE and Practitioner Papers are due
Submission and Evaluation of WiP and CoRe Papers
All articles must be submitted to one of the tracks below. Once submitted, articles will be distributed for evaluation among the pool of reviewers according to their domain of expertise and the topics addressed by the research paper ( ISCRAM.ORG Reviewing Guidelines). Papers related to the conference themes are particularly welcome. Accepted papers will be organized into sessions for the conference that will be distributed among the tracks.
Click the "SUBMIT YOUR CONTRIBUTION" button on the right of this page to make your submission through EasyChair.Once in EasyChair be sure to select an appropriate track for your submission.
Please use the following templates for the submission of the contributions:
ISCRAM 2023 TRACKS AND INDIVIDUAL CALLS
Track 01: Usability and Universal Design of ICT for Emergency Management (Chairs: Terje Gjøsæter, Jaziar Radianti, and Weiqin Chen)
This track focuses on Usability and Universal Design of ICT in Emergency Management which is becoming an important emerging area of research within the ISCRAM community. The primary objectives of the track are to focus on usability for all users, and to promote an understanding the implications of ICT for elderly and people with disability in emergency management, uncover how ICT can contribute to remove barriers, and bring together relevant researchers and practitioners to ensure access to information for all in an emergency situation. [ More...] Track 02: Visions for Future Crisis Management (Chairs: Anne-Marie Barthe-Delanoe, Aurélie Montranal, and Rob Grace)
To inspire new questions and approaches that can anticipate and shape the ways we address crises in the future, the Visions for Future Crisis Management track aims to (1) introduce new ideas that fall outside or extend beyond research presented in current ISCRAM conference tracks and (2) promote discussion by organizing roundtable discussions of short, work-in-progress papers rather than typical panel sessions of completed research papers. [ More...] Track 03: Enhancing Protection of Critical Infrastructures (Stefan Schauer, Sandra König, and Stefan Rass)
Critical infrastructures (CIs) are located at the heart of today’s society and provide a multitude of vital services. This has become even more evident during the recent COVID pandemic and the crisis in the Ukraine, when disruptions and shortages in various sectors have highlighted the complex interdependencies among the CIs and the importance of international supply chains. Hence, the protection of CIs has developed into a multi-dimensional problem that requires consideration of a broad range of different views. When performing a thorough analysis, theoretical concepts and models are as important as domain-specific knowledge and expert opinions and experience. Obtaining a systemic view on critical infrastructures, their upstream and downstream supply chains and their vulnerabilities has become a major goal in nowadays’ risk, crisis and resilience management. [ More...] Track 04: Technologies for First Responders (Chairs: Evangelos Sdongos, Angelos Amditis, Eleftherios Ouzounoglou, Petros Daras, Anastasios Dimou, George Boustras, and Tiina Ristmäe)
This track invites novel qualitative and quantitative research, studies as well as use cases presenting technologies for First Responders (fire brigades, emergency medical services, police agencies and civil protection organizations) and describing intelligent, integrated, interconnected and seamless tools & services that add layers of protection against the dangers of their working environment and augment their situational awareness. Contributions on novel tools and services for FRs: 1) for enabling protection of the first responders with respect to their health, safety and security; 2) for enhancing their operational capacities by offering them means to conduct various response tasks and missions boosted with autonomy, automation, precise positioning, optimal utilization of available resources, upgraded awareness and sense-making; and 3) for allowing shared response across first responders’ teams and disciplines by augmenting their field of view, information sharing and communication among teams and with victims, are warmly encouraged. The common denominator of this track remains upgrading the capacities of FRs with novel ICT technologies to perform under complex, dynamic and stressful environments that facilitate efficient and collaborative response and ultimately effective decision making. [ More...] Track 05: Disaster Public Health and Healthcare Informatics (Chairs: Zeno Franco, Reem Abbas, Samanta Varela Castro, TyKera Mims, Abigael Collier, Heidi Steinecker, Julie Dugdale, and Sanjib Bhattacharya)
The COVID-19 pandemic placed a renewed focus on informatics-based approaches for healthcare systems and public health systems responding to crises. The domain of disaster healthcare informatics is unique in that it involves multiple medical subdisciplines ranging from global/emergency medicine to primary care. Public health infrastructure, ranging from community engagement to laboratory services also play a pivotal role in responding to major health crises. Health systems also must interface effectively with joint emergency operations centers often at multiple levels of government. These systems rely heavily on physician, nurse, infection preventionists, and EMT practitioners and address both population level and individual patient level data. Given these factors, data fusion/integration, data security and privacy, and the legal and ethical implications of information systems designed to support healthcare and public health systems in crisis are of particular importance. Areas of significant innovation in disaster health informatics are occurring in part because of the complexity of the current pandemic, but also more broadly in the field. Areas of particular interest for the track include computational epidemiology, hot-spotting, community situated case management, contact tracing, automated / autonomous / robotic clinical systems, healthcare associated infections (particularly in long term care settings), and disaster mortuary. [ More...] Track 06: Social Media for Crisis Management (Chairs: Amanda Lee Hughes, Doina Caragea, Muhammad Imran, Linda Plotnick, Christian Reuter, and Cody Buntain)
The aim of this track is to showcase current research on how the use of Social Media can help in crisis response, management, and resilience. We invite papers that provide rich description and/or evaluation of the design and/or actual use of Social Media for collaboration and/or widespread participation in any phase of crisis management, from initial planning and preparedness, through detection, response, recovery, and resilience. [ More...] Track 07: Analytical Modeling and Simulation (Chairs: Josey Chacko, Andrew Arnette, Duygu Pamukcu, and Chris Zobel)
The aim of this track is to discuss the development and application of analytic problem-solving techniques, including simulation, optimization, and statistical analysis, which can help improve decision making in the context of crisis management. The development of such techniques is critical as part of an integrated and interdisciplinary approach that combines the various aspects of crisis management to support informed and effective decision making. This track invites both theoretical and applied research papers discussing topics relevant to the concepts of modeling and simulation. Its overall purpose is to provide a dedicated venue for such research to be shared and discussed, and thus to highlight the breadth and depth of efforts to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of crisis management. In honor of this year's conference theme, submissions which explicitly support building resilient societies will be particularly welcome. [ More...] Track 08: Reimagining ethical, legal, and social issues in a COVID era (Chairs: Katrina Petersen and Selby Knudsen)
This track invites contributions to reimagine our understanding of ethical, legal, and social issues (ELSI) raised by the use of information and communication technologies in crisis response and management. The aim is to inform careful innovation, design, and use of information technology (IT) and to do so, we are looking for papers that explore ELSI at the juncture of policy, technology, and communities or where social and organizational practices meet. Climate crises, energy transitions, cascading disasters, COVID-19 experiences, among others, have re-exposed the need to directly engage discourses around the impacts of IT in crises. Use of these data and tools shape our understanding of a crisis and can enable more informed, agile and coordinated emergency management. But they can also introduce new uncertainties, make some risks more visible than others, raise difficult questions about access or trust, and have unexpected yet far-reaching societal implications. Use of these tools have revealed the ethical, legal, and societal challenges of, for example, clearly defining the boundaries of a crisis, prioritising specific benefits, sharing information between agencies or across borders, communicating risks, or making decisions about what actions to take. We list some core topics below and invite practitioner reports, academic papers, and demonstrations of technologies. We invite contributions on how the design, development, and use of crisis information technology, in the broadest sense, can address these tensions to ensure the protection of human rights, create positive societal impact, advise policy, improve IT education, or encourage new forms of critical thinking and approaches to resilience. [ More...] Track 09: Command and Control Studies (Chairs: Björn JE Johansson and Peter Berggren)
Command and Control (C2) is a socio-technical process that aims to create coordination and collaboration among entities with a shared focus. Crisis situations usually demand that action is taken by a multitude of actors in a coordinated fashion, suggestion that crisis response must involve C2. The immediate handling of a crisis involves, from a C2 perspective, information gathering, planning, orientation, decision-making, coordinating, acting, and feedback. The before and after phases of a crisis concern the preparation of C2 structures and the evaluation of C2 work. This topic is cross-disciplinary and comprise studies of real-world situations as well as studies of exercises, training, and simulation of C2 work or tasks. The C2 track invites qualitative and quantitative studies, and case studies on techniques and methods that affect the way command and control is conducted and assessed. We especially invite submissions concerning evaluation of methods for designing exercises and training, such as scenario development, simulation, exercise design, debriefing facilitation, etc. Literature reviews of methods contributing to the development of C2 training and/or exercises are also welcomed. [ More...] Track 10: Volunteers in Crisis Management/Emergency Response (Chairs: Sofie Pilemalm, Caroline Rizza, Niki Matinrad, Robin Batard, Ophélie Morand, Deborah Bunker, and Kayvan Yousefi Mojir)
The importance of volunteerism in crisis management and emergency response has been known for decades and is once again highlighted by current events e.g., COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, floods, storms and wildfires due to climate change. While crises occur, emergency responders also need to attend to smaller frequent emergencies, for example house fires, medical emergencies, accidents and traffic incidents. In these circumstances, volunteers can and do make a difference in first response. On one hand, there is a need to train and integrate volunteers within disaster management preparation, response and recovery as well as within emergency management operations. On the other hand, both full-time and volunteer disaster and emergency and crisis responders need to adapt their practices in order to realize the benefits of both available information and communications technologies in support of these practices and the spontaneous initiatives they may support. The aim of this track is to showcase current research on how the involvement of volunteers can support crisis and emergency management using various ICT, and what are the needs, challenges and solutions. The track is broad, and we invite papers that provide rich descriptions or evaluations on integration of volunteers and on design, development and use of related technology support. [ More...] Track 11: Applications, Tools, and Components for Crisis Management (Chairs: Bas Lijnse, Jürgen Moßgraber, and Anastasios (Tasos) Karakostas)
Many people in the ISCRAM community design and/or build information systems. Either as research prototypes, or for real world applications. The final results are sometimes presented in ISCRAM conferences, but we usually don’t share our experience with the tools, languages, libraries, off-the-shelf components and services that were used to create these systems. In this interactive track, authors are invited to share their experiences with a specific tool (library/service/framework etc.) that they used to build (a part of) an information system for crisis response and management and to assist others in using it too. We welcome contributions from author’s who are either regular users of the presented tool, or who are the developers/vendors of the tool. Presented tools should be publicly available to try out. For proprietary tools this means there must be a free trial version. [ More...] Track 12: Geospatial Technologies, Location Analytics, and Geographic Information Science (GIS) for Crisis Management (Chairs: João Porto de Albuquerque, Michael A. Erskine, and Andrés Díaz López)
With crisis and hazardous events being an “inherently spatial” problem, geospatial information and technologies frequently support disaster and crisis management. Therefore, geospatial methods and tools - such as Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) architectures, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), spatial databases, spatial-temporal methods, as well as geovisual analytics technologies - have a great potential to contribute to understanding the geospatial characteristics of a crisis, such as to estimate damaged areas, define evacuation routes, and plan resource distribution. New forms of data such as sensor data, social media, and OpenStreetMap (OSM) are employed to support disaster management (e.g., near real-time mapping). These big geospatial data pose new challenges for geospatial data visualization and data modeling and analysis. Existing technologies, methodologies, and approaches now deal with data shared in various formats, velocities, and uncertainties. In line with this year’s conference theme, the GIS Track welcomes submissions that tackle approaches toward building relevant humanitarian technologies and resilient societies. We believe that geospatial data, tools, and methods will be essential to addressing such wicked problems. [ More...] Track 13: Infrastructure Health Monitoring During Crises and Disaster (Chairs: Chungwook Sim, Brian Ricks, and Constantin Chalioris)
Recent approaches allow for the intelligent monitoring of critical infrastructure. These infrastructure under man-made or natural hazards, and even under normal service conditions which are aging can be under crisis conditions. Can monitoring the health of infrastructure provide crucial information before, during, or after a disaster or crisis event? What sensors, devices, databases, and AI algorithms should be necessarily designed to deal with the challenges associated with such disaster or crisis? [ More...] Track 14: Collaborative Robots for Emergency Situations (Chairs: Filippo Sanfilippo and Gionata Salvietti)
Robots designed for direct human-robot cooperation (HRC) in a shared environment are referred to as collaborative robots (cobots). Novel scientific trends in cobots research are moving the technology from predictable spaces like production lines into disaster zones. Cobots can collaborate with their human teammates in the aftermath of earthquakes, accidents, avalanches, or explosions, reducing the risk to human life and enhancing the likelihood of rescuing victims. In this track, authors are invited to share their research focusing on the fact that the collaboration between humans and robots needs to go much further – rather than seeing robots as tools or mobile sensors, they need to be seen as a team member in emergency situations. [ More...] Track 15: Cybersecurity and Emergency Management (Chairs: Lazaros Iliadis, Konstantinos Demertzis, Jaziar Radianti, and George Grispos)
We invite theoretical and empirical papers using technical or social approaches that address the intersection of cybersecurity and crisis response/management and other emerging issues in this area. Research works that use a typical cybersecurity analysis approach but can show its relevance for emergency management are our welcome. We encourge all research methodologies and thought pieces that challenge extant thinking. We also, in particular, invite papers that focus on the themes of ISCRAM 2023. [ More...] Track 16: AI for Crisis Management (Chairs: Hemant Purohit, Antonio De Nicola, and Ayan Mukhopadhyay)
This track aims to facilitate a forum for presenting state-of-the-art works on information systems infused with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies for disaster risk management, including novel ontologies, semantic data models, knowledge graphs, natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning methods, and data-driven planning and optimization for decision processes such as emergency resource allocation. Timely extraction and management of relevant information during an emergency, a disaster, or a crisis event is a critical requirement for the design of information systems to support decision-making. Collecting, filtering, representing, reasoning, and distributing relevant information to different stakeholders timely and in an interoperable format is challenging yet critical. AI technologies present potential solutions to manage this complexity of information management during disasters, for example, transforming unstructured data streams into a structured form of actionable knowledge can provide real-time decision support to the emergency management agencies. Similarly, principled resource optimization that takes future uncertainty into account can ensure that resources focus on non-myopic gains. [ More...] Track 17: Practitioner Engagement Track (Chairs: Nick Lalone and Changwon Son)
ISCRAM has continued to expand in recent years and practitioners remain a critical part of the community. We welcome submissions from practitioners in 2 different formats: Roundtables and Papers. [ More...] Track 18: Open Track (Chairs: Ioannis Ioannis M. Dokas, Nick Lalone, Jaziar Radianti, and Deepak Khazanchi)
The purpose of this track is to enable the submission of manuscripts that analyze topics outside of the scope of the main tracks. We especially encourage the submission of manuscripts that introduce and analyze emerging and boundary–spanning themes. [ More...]
