The WolbPack will post on this page and on the blog updates on the progress with the project “Emergency Management Cycle-Centric R&D: From National Prototyping to Global Implementation).”
Funder New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) – 2021 Innovative Approaches to Research in the Pandemic Context competition, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)(NFRFR-2021-00277 Emergency Management Cycle-Centric R&D: From National Prototyping to Global Implementation).
Nominated Principal Investigator: Svetlana Yanushkevich, University of Calgary
Co applicants Lorian Hardcastle University of calgary
Gregor Wolbring
Focus of the project
Risk of natural and human-made disasters skyrocketed, as rare events become highly expected. This Proposal is motivated by resent critical economical and humanitarian losses, and massive failures of national and international emergency management systems due to a rare pandemic. In particular,
– The e-health care failed to contribute to local and global epidemic monitoring.
– Management and leadership teams were not assisted by computational intelligence (CI), leading to failure to contain the epidemic outbreaks, such as in the case of USS Theodore Roosevelt.
– Privacy principles were systematically broken and emergently replaced by temporary rules, e.g. in contact tracing.
In order to decrease the cost, most of the R&D processes are currently being simplified, by ignoring the risks of such in case of disasters. This is a source of failures of technology applications. The goal of this Proposal is to bridge these gaps in the technology R&D. We propose a conceptual counter-epidemiological framework for the R&D. It is based on the Emergency Management Cycle (EMC) doctrine, and will be implemented via machine reasoning.
While the R&D processes of CI tools are strongly standardized for reliability and performance, the requirements to counter extreme and rare events are barely covered by regulations. This Proposal argues that the R&D must be profiled for utility in case of rare events. This is achievable by adapting the concept and policies of the EMC. The proposed EMC-centric R&D is defined as a set of recommendations, accordingly to the four phases of EMC, i.e. mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. The high risk of this approach is in difficulty of harmonizing the all parties involved in the EMC. However, it can be applied to any CI tool R&D, and thus, the outcome is highly rewarded. The novelty of the proposal is in a methodology to translate the R&D into the EMC-centric one:
– Local and global epidemic monitoring must be included in the R&D of the CI, e.g. e-health and e-coaching.
– Rare-event risk assessment based on machine reasoning shall be performed at each step of the EMC-centric R&D.
– ‘Privacy-by-design’ principles shall be embedded in such R&D.
We will develop an EMC-centric e-health system prototype and guidelines that utilize the recent pandemic scenarios. The proposed guidelines will help to develop specific Canada R&D strategies and technologies, and contribute to the global EMC-centric R&D strategies.
The focus of my group is on the level of gap analysis of the topics and literacy increase of people involved in the topic of emergency and disaster management using among others an EDI lens which is about how EDI groups are covered within emergency and disaster management and how to increase literacy for people involved in emergency and disaster including researchers on how emergencies and disasters impact EDI groups.
Output of the Wolbpack
newest to oldest (all peer reviewed, if not indicated otherwise) all output on this page funded by New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) – 2021 Innovative Approaches to Research in the Pandemic Context competition, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)(NFRFR-2021-00277 Emergency Management Cycle-Centric R&D: From National Prototyping to Global Implementation).(articles in bold, presentations beyond local reach italic)
2023
my students underlined
- Lillywhite Brielle and Wolbring Gregor (2023) Risk Narrative of Emergency and Disaster Management, Preparedness, and Planning (EDMPP): The Importance of the ‘Social’ Sustainability 2023, 15(1), 387; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010387This Project was partially supported by the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) – 2021 Innovative Approaches to Research in the Pandemic Context competition, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)(NFRFR-2021-00277 Emergency Management Cycle-Centric R&D: From National Prototyping to Global Implementation).
2022
my students underlined
- Wolbring, Gregor; Salvatore, Chiara; Lillywhite, Brielle (2022) November 11 Missing the Mark: Youth Environmental Activism, Emergency and Disaster Management, and Disabled People 8th Eco-ability conference (virtual)
- Lillywhite Brielle and Wolbring Gregor (2022) Emergency and Disaster Management, Preparedness, and Planning (EDMPP) and the ‘Social’: A Scoping Review in Sustainability 14(20), 13519; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142013519 This Project was partially supported by the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) – 2021 Innovative Approaches to Research in the Pandemic Context competition, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)(NFRFR-2021-00277 Emergency Management Cycle-Centric R&D: From National Prototyping to Global Implementation).
Gregor Wolbring and the WolbPack 