Seminar  on Social Networking for Emergency Response
Date:  Februray  23, Wednesday 5:50-7:05pm
Place: EN101

Social networking has played a signficant role in the organizing the recent protests in Middle East.  It was also used successfully by organizations for disaster relief such inrief.org.  Many government agencies include DHS, DHHS, and Northcom  have invented resources and created data fusion centers to extract, filter, and distribute information on social media. It is a challenging research issue to evaluate the trustworthiness, sensitiveness, and impact of the information sources and information itself. Utilizing cloud computing to efficiently distribute timely, customized, sensitive information is another.

In this mini-seminar series, we invite two experts to discuss how social media and networking technologies are used in emergency response and disaster relief, share their recent research activities,  findings, and their insights on what are related challegening research and development issues.   Each of them will give 30 minutes presentation, followed by 15 minutes Q&A.

Talk 1 Title: Building the Unclassified User Defined Operational Picture (UDOP) Leveraging the internet and social networks
Speaker: Mr. Gary Koch, manager of the NORAD/USNORTHCOM C2 Systems Operations and Maintenance
Abstract: Discuss concepts such as Web 2.0, Web 3.0, social networking, semantic web and intelligent composeability to stimulate further research, collaboration and crowdsourcing.

Short Bio: Mr. Gary Koch, SPAWAR Systems Center (SSC) Pacific, is assigned to the
J643 Command and Control (C2) Systems, Situational Awareness Branch at NORAD and USNORTHCOM and serves as the Deputy Branch Chief.  His primary area of emphasis is manager of the NORAD/USNORTHCOM C2 Systems Operations and Maintenance.  Some of the systems under his purview are;  Global Command and Control System (GCCS), NORAD C2, Theatre Battle Management Core System (TBMCS), Joint Blue Forces Situational Awareness, Friendly Force Tracking and Missile Defense.  Before joining government service, Mr. Koch served 26 years in the USMC.  Mr. Koch holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Citadel and a Master degree in Information Management Technology from Naval Post Graduate School.

Talk 2 title: Project HEROIC: What Online Informal Communications Reveal About Social Structure and Process in Disaster
Speaker:  Dr. Jeannette Sutton
Abstract:    I will discuss sociological processes of warnings, rumoring, and information dissemination via online communications in disaster.  I will  provide preliminary findings of rumoring research on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and discuss applications of this research.

Short Bio: Jeannette Sutton, Ph.D., is a disaster sociologist working with the Trauma Health and Hazards Center at UCCS.  She specializes on the use of informal communication media (social media) for alerts and warnings and crisis communications during disaster.  She has received two grants from the National Science Foundation to conduct this research and is affiliated with several DHS Centers of Excellence.  She is also chairing an international conference on Technology for Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Relief (funded by the Office of Naval Research) to be held here in May, 2011.