Disaster Early Warning and Relief: A Human-Centered Approach

Effective need collection is a major part of post-disaster assessment and recovery. A system for matching needs with available offers is an essential component for the recovery of communities in the aftermath of natural disasters. In the classic approach, the needs of disaster-stricken communities are collected by rescue personnel sampling a geographic grid and using emergency communication facilities. Subsequently, needs are matched to offers available at some central server and relief interventions are planned to deliver them. In this chapter, after an introduction to this approach, we explore the new notion of peer-to-peer community empowerment for some key activities of disaster management, including early warning systems, needs collection, and need-to-offer matching. Then, we present the design of a framework that leverages on the capacity for the communities to self-organize during crisis management, proposing advanced algorithms and techniques for need-offer matching. Our framework supports pre- and post-disaster use of social networks information and connectivity via an evolvable vocabulary, and supports metrics for resilience assessments and improvement.