Vimala Nunavath

Big Data Metadata Management in Smart Grids

Smart home, smart grids, smart museum, smart cities, etc. are making the vision for living in smart environments come true. These smart environments are built based upon the Internet of Things paradigm where many devices and applications are involved. In these environments, data are collected from various sources in diverse formats. The data are then processed by different intelligent systems with the purpose of providing efficient system planning, power delivery, and customer operations. Even though there are known technologies for most of these smart environments, putting them together to make intelligent and context-aware systems is not an easy task. The reason is that there are semantic inconsistencies between applications and systems. These inconsistencies can be solved by using metadata. This chapter presents management of big data metadata in smart grids. Three important issues in managing and solutions to overcome them are discussed. As a part of future grids, some concrete examples from the offshore wind energy are used to demonstrate the solutions.

Taking the Advantage of Smartphone Apps for Understanding Information Needs of Emergency Response Teams’ for Situational Awareness: Evidence from an Indoor Fire Game

In search and rescue (SAR) operation, a lot of information is being shared among different emergency response groups. However, one of the key challenges experienced by these rescue groups during SAR operation is obtaining the complete awareness of the situation from the shared information. Moreover, one of the key actions of rescue leaders is to get the needed information in order to coordinate effectively with other teams and perform well. So, in this study we conduct an indoor fire drill with the help of Smartphone application with two settings (without SmartRescue smartphone application and with SmartRescue smartphone application) to find out what type of information is mostly communicated in both scenarios and needed by response teams. The presented results combine observations, qualitative and quantitative data analysis on videotaped data after the game. The results indicate that information categories which are formulated more recurrent in second scenario than first scenario. This might be explained as technology is more effective for sharing the information which is available on the smartphone application for obtaining situational awareness and for coordination.

The Impacts of ICT Support on Information Distribution, Task Assignment for Gaining Teams’ Situational Awareness in Search and Rescue Operations

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has changed the way we communicate and work. To study the effects of ICT for Information Distribution (ID) and Task Assignment (TA) for gaining Teams’ Situational Awareness (TSA) across and within rescue teams, an indoor fire game was played with students. We used two settings (smartphone-enabled support vs. traditional walkietalkies) to analyze the impact of technology on ID and TA for gaining TSA in a simulated Search and Rescue operation. The results presented in this paper combine observations and quantitative data from a survey conducted after the game. The results indicate that the use of the ICT was good in second scenario than first scenario for ID and TA for gaining TSA. This might be explained as technology is more preferable and effective for information sharing, for gaining TSA and also for clear tasks assignment.

Identifying First Responders Information Needs: Supporting Search and Rescue Operations for Fire Emergency Response

At the onset of an indoor fire emergency, the availability of the information becomes critical due to the chaotic situation at the emergency site. Moreover, if information is lacking, not shared, or responders are too overloaded to acknowledge it, lives can be lost and property can be harmed. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to identify information items that are needed for first responders during search and rescue operations. The authors use an educational building fire emergency as a case and show how first responders can be supported by getting access to information that are stored in different information systems. The research methodology used was a combination of literature review, fire drills participation, and semi-structured interviews with first responders from different emergency organizations. The results presented are identified information items and an information model.

LifeRescue: A web based application for emergency responders during fire emergency response

In order to respond to any kind of building fire emergencies, first-responders have to use lot of time to get access to the emergency data such as location of the victims who are still inside the building, location of the hazardous material, location of the resources and location of the exits in order to perform search and rescue. However, search is possibly one of the most dangerous activities on the fire ground. Sometimes the visibility is zero and the environment is really hot. Because of the limited operating time in the building, the key to successful search is how quickly emergency responders can get access to the emergency related information in order to save victims and the property. In this paper, we present a developed web portal called LifeRescue, which enables the emergency responders (both on-scene and remote) to get access to the emergency information during search and rescue operation. This application facilitates awareness of the information such as number of victims who are still inside the building and their location to the emergency responders who are at command center as well as at on-scene. Our system also provides the information related to the location of the fire and also its development through sensor data.

On the Usability of Smartphone Apps in Emergencies

It is very critical that the disaster management smartphone app users be able to interact efficiently and effectively with the app during an emergen-cy. An overview of the challenges face for designing mobile HCI in emergency management tools is presented in this paper. Then, two recently developed emergency management tools, titled GDACSmobile and SmartRescue, are studied from usability and HCI challenges point of view. These two tools use mobile app and smartphone sensors as the main functionality respectively. Both have a smartphone app and a web-based app with different UIs for their different user groups. Furthermore, the functionality of these apps in the format of a designed scenario, fire onboard a passenger ship, will be discussed.

Neuroevolution of Actively Controlled Virtual Characters - An Experiment for an Eight-Legged Character

Physics-based character animation offers an attractive alternative for traditional animations. However, it is often strenuous for a physics-based approach to incorporate active user control of different characters. In this paper, a neuroevolutionary approach is proposed using HyperNEAT to combine individually trained neural controllers to form a control strategy for a simulated eight-legged character, which is a previously untested character morphology for this algorithm. It is aimed to evaluate the robustness and responsiveness of the control strategy that changes the controllers based on simulated user inputs. The experiment result shows that HyperNEAT is able to evolve long walking controllers for this character. In addition, it also suggests a requirement for further refinement when operated in tandem.

Deep Neural Networks for Prediction of Exacerbations of Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) patients need help in daily life situations as they are burdened with frequent risks of acute exacerbation and loss of control. An automated monitoring system could lead to timely treatments and avoid unnecessary hospital (re-)admissions and home visits by doctors or nurses. Therefore we present a Deep Artificial Neural Networks for approach prediction of exacerbations, particularly Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN) for classification of COPD patients category and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), for early prediction of COPD exacerbations and subsequent triage. The FFNN and LSTM models are trained on data collected from remote monitoring of 94 patients through a real monitoring session and therefore represents realistic home monitoring situations. Most deep learning models require large datasets in order to predict with a high degree of accuracy. Our experiments show that with only 94 patients, the FFNN model is able to reproduce health condition provided by a medical doctor with an accuracy of 92.86% and the LSTM model able to predict COPD patients’ health conditions one-day ahead with an accuracy of 84.12%. Based on our results, we believe that our work will help the medical doctors and nurses in identifying patients with acute exacerbation in advance which can lead to better patient care and decision making, and hence reduction of costs.

LifeRescue Software Prototype for Supporting Emergency Responders During Fire Emergency Response: A Usability and User Requirements Evaluation

For an efficient emergency response, emergency responders (ERs) should exchange information with one another to obtain an adequate understanding and common operational picture of the emergency situation. Despite the current developments on information systems, many ERs are unable to get access to the relevant information as the data is heterogeneous and distributed at different places and due to security and privacy barriers. As a result, ERs are unable to coordinate well and to make good decisions. Therefore, to overcome these difficulties, a web-based application called LifeRescue was developed for supporting easy information access during emergency search and rescue operation. The goal of the paper is to test the developed LifeRescue system against the user requirements. We conducted a workshop with nine participants i.e., six ERs from fire protection service and three ERs from police service. First, the workshop session started with prototype demonstration and trial, then a System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire was given, and finally a semi-structured interview was conducted to collect data on the user requirements validation. The results presented in this paper combine both qualitative and quantitative data from a semi-structured interview and a survey conducted after the prototype demonstration and trail. The interview results indicate that our developed system fulfils the user requirements of 6 ERs from fire protection and 3 ERs from police services. Furthermore, the survey results indicate that the participants would like to use our developed system frequently as they felt that it was easy for them to get access to information with a simplified view.

Data Sources Handling for Emergency Management: Supporting Information Availability and Accessibility for Emergency Responders

Information is an essential component for better emergency response. Although a lot of information being available at various places during any kind of emergency, many emergency responders (ERs) use only a limited amount of the available information. The reason for this is that the available information heterogeneously distributed, in different formats, and ERs are unable to get access to the relevant information. Moreover, without having access to the needed information, many emergency responders are not able to obtain a sufficient understanding of the emergency situation. Consequently, a lot of time is being used to search for the needed information and poor decisions may be made. Therefore, in this paper, our research focuses on bringing the available heterogeneously dispersed information together to improve the information accessibility for ERs. In this study, we present an approach for integration of heterogeneous databases in the Semantic Web context using a Model-driven data integration approach based on an information model. We propose an architecture using the Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) and web service technologies for facilitating knowledge sharing and data exchange between different ERs. Based on the proposed architecture, we developed a system prototype and presented it with an indoor fire emergency response scenario.