Workshop Overview

The DRBoaST workshop will provide a stimulating forum for interactions among researchers, practitioners, and solution providers in disaster management, IoT, smart buildings, building management and safety systems, and related areas. This workshop will be co-located with IEEE SmartWorld 2017 at San Francisco, CA, USA.

Theme of the Workshop

Recent technological and infrastructure advances in areas related to disaster risk reduction have enabled authorities in developed regions to generate accurate early alerts of common types of natural disasters; encode the alerts in CAP (Common Alert Protocol) format, a widely adopted, machine-readable international standard format, and disseminate the alerts via all communication pathways. Today, the common practice is to have emergency alert systems/services (EAS) translate the alert messages into textual and audio warnings and then broadcast them to people. Typical warnings provide individuals with little or no specific instructions on how to respond at their locations. This fact and limitation in human reaction time limit the effectiveness of early warnings. A better alternative is to send early alerts from authorized senders directly to active devices and applications that can process the alerts and automatically take appropriate location-specific actions to reduce the chance of injuries and minimize property damages based on not only the parameters of each alert but also on attributes of nearby environment and objects in general and properties of the building and interior layout indoors. Emergent results from applied research efforts on disaster preparedness, smart buildings, and related areas have demonstrated the concept of such active devices and mobile applications and active emergency response systems containing them, in particular, the potential of such systems to significantly enhance the disaster preparedness/emergency response of our homes, workplaces, large public buildings and open spaces.

The DRBoaST workshop will provide a stimulating forum for interactions among researchers, practitioners, and solution providers in disaster management, IoT, smart buildings, building management and safety systems, and related areas. The goal is to identify challenges, exchange ideas, share solutions and establish future collaborations needed to pave the road of transforming research prototypes into matured, widely deployable active emergency response systems: Such a system for a large public building can contain a vast number of diverse active smart devices, local sensors and mobile applications, i.e., smart things. They must respond reliably to concurrent multiple alerts that call for conflicting responses, alerts that are canceled and reissued, and so on. Other complicating factors include the presence of people and crowds, who are also active smart entities and may respond to alerts on their own.

Call for Papers:

The workshop seeks papers that describe original research and development results, as well as position and work-in- progress papers on issues arisen from these factors. Topics of interest include the following:

  • Security and safety of active emergency response systems
  • Testbed and tools for assessing functionalities, performance, and dependability
  • Interfaces and interoperability with diverse sensors and actuators in smart world
  • Disaster resilient decision support infrastructure
  • Building/environment data cloud/fog/mist for fine-scale, location-specific responses
  • Building information models and facility management data to support location specificity
  • Use of sensors and surveillance devices in smart world for real-time damage assessment
  • Innovative dual usages of active smart devices, applications, and systems
  • Regulatory and legal issues

Submissions:

Full papers are limited to 8 pages, and position and work-in-progress papers are limited to 4 pages, following the IEEE conference proceedings format, and are to be submitted as PDF via the submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ieeeswc2017

Accepted papers will be published by IEEE CIS (IEEE-DL and EI indexed). At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register and present their work at the workshop; otherwise, the paper will not be included in the proceedings.

Important Dates

  • Paper Submission Deadline: April 17, 2017 (Extended)
  • Authors Notification Date: May 17, 2017
  • Camera-ready Deadline: June 10, 2017

Organizing Committee

  • General Chair: Jane W. S. Liu, Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica Taiwan
  • Program Committee Co-Chairs:
    • Chi-Sheng Shih, Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering National Taiwan University
    • Edward T. H. Chu, Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering National Yunlin University of Science and Technology
  • Program Committee Members
    • Girija Chetty, Disaster management, and smart health, Faculty of Education, Science, Technology and Math, University of Canberra, Australia;
    • Ghassan Beydoun, Disaster Management and Disaster Information Systems, School of Systems, Management and Leadership, University of Technology Sidney, Australia.
    • Masaru Yarime, public policy and corporate strategy, and innovation for energy, environment, and sustainability; School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong,
    • Hideyuki Tokuda, ubiquitous computing systems, decentralized autonomous systems, embedded systems, sensor networks, and smart spaces; Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Japan.
    • Kwei-Jay Lin, M2M management, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California Irvine, USA
    • Marco Caccamo, Internet of Things, wearable computing, mobile computing, and cyber- physical systems, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana- Champaign, USA.
    • Feng-Tyan Lin, Geographic Information Systems, Computer Aided Planning and Design, Urban and Regional Information Systems, Informational city, Urban and Regional Planning; Urban Planning Department, National Cheng-Kung University, Taiwan.