Irma Becerra-Fernandez

Project ensayo: Designing a virtual emergency operations center

Hurricane Katrina was one of the most expensive and devastating natural disasters in American history [41]. Over half a million people were affected by the hurricane, and the US energy infrastructure was severely damaged [41]. Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters clearly show the need for improvements in crisis management, especially in training and collaboration among federal, state, and local governments [1,41]. In this paper, we describe Project Ensayo: a socio-cognitive-technical simulator and training facility for upper level emergency managers and a tool for cognitive scientists to study the decision making process under emergency conditions. In particular, we describe how the underlying architecture accommodates the various learning requirements inherent in a dynamic, evolving, and unique organizational structure situated in a highly variable complex threat environment.

Project ENSAYO: A Virtual Emergency Operations Center for Disaster Management Research, Training and Discovery

Disaster management, before, during, and after the event, is dynamic, complex, and ill-defined, and the events themselves are rare and diverse due to the many characteristics that define them. Prior decisions may be thoroughly documented via after action reports, but these may not cover every issue as frequently unique and unanticipated events arise during each emergency. The nature of the decisions, where they are made, who makes them, the data and information resources required to make and monitor them, and the location of available knowledge to drive them may sometimes be unknown, unavailable, or both. This paper describes the research activities of Project Ensayo, which seeks to support and enable multiple research projects investigating processes, functions and structures present at Emergency Operations Centers, including situational awareness, knowledge management, inferences from dynamic data, disaster management and mechanisms of command, control, communication and coordination.

Actor model and knowledge management systems: social interaction as a framework for knowledge integration

Expertise locator systems (ELS) are a special type of knowledge management systems that are used to help locate intellectual capital. The searchable answer-generating environment (SAGE) is an expertise locator system that was developed to identify experts in the state of Florida. This presentation describes an application of the actor model of computation to the development of expertise locator systems (ELS). The actor model describes an approach to modeling intelligence in terms of a society of communicating knowledge-based problem experts where each expert may in turn be viewed as a society of primitive actors. A conceptual implementation for SAGE, and ELS in general, based on the actor model as a design paradigm is described. Practical applications for an actor-model based ELS are also discussed.