skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Co-Design Smart Disaster Management Systems with Indigenous Communities
Tribal governments bear an uneven burden in the face of escalating disaster risks, climate change, and environmental degradation, primarily due to their deeply entrenched ties to the environment and its resources. Regrettably, accessing vital information and evidence to secure adequate funding or support poses difficulties for enrolled tribal members and their lands. In response to these challenges, this paper collaborates with tribal nations to co-design intelligent disaster management systems using AI chatbots and drone technologies. The primary objective is to explore how tribal governments perceive and experience these emerging technologies in the realm of disaster reporting practices. This paper presents participatory design studies. First, we interviewed seasoned first-line emergency managers and hosted an in-person design workshop to introduce theEmergency Reporterchatbot. Second, we organized a follow-up design workshop on tribal land to deliberate the utilization of drones within their community. Through qualitative analysis, we unveiled key themes surrounding integrating these emergency technologies within the jurisdiction of tribal governments. The findings disclosed substantial backing from tribal governments and their tribal members for the proposed technologies. Moreover, we delved into the potential of chatbots and drones to empower tribal governments in disaster management, safeguard their sovereignty, and facilitate collaboration with other agencies.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2317086
PAR ID:
10527486
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Digital Government: Research and Practice
ISSN:
2691-199X
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Kenawy, Ahmed (Ed.)
    The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has long advocated for what it calls a “Whole Community approach” to disaster resilience and recovery. This philosophy holds that the priorities of all governmental, commercial, and interest groups should be considered, and their capabilities leveraged, in preparing for and responding to disasters. According to FEMA, federally recognized Tribal governments are part of the “Whole Community.” In this paper we use systematic content analysis techniques to examine policy documents derived from the Hazard Mitigation Assistance grant program to assess whether and how FEMA has taken the concrete policy steps necessary to include Tribal governments in the “Whole Community.” We find that while FEMA has expressed interest in a more equitable and accessible program that serves the needs of Tribal governments, it has taken few practical steps toward this goal. 
    more » « less
  2. Recent decades have seen a significant increase in the frequency, intensity, and impact of natural disasters and other emergencies, forcing the governments around the world to make emergency response and disaster management national priorities. The growth of extremely large and complex datasets — commonly referred to as big data — and various advances in information and communications technology and computing now support more effective approaches to humanitarian relief, logistical coordination, overall disaster management, and long-term recovery in connection with natural disasters and emergency events. Leveraging big data and technological advances for emergency management has attracted considerable attention in the research community. However, the desired merging of big data and emergency management (BDEM) requires coordinated efforts to align and define interdisciplinary terminologies and methodologies. To date, the key concepts and technologies in this emerging research area have not been coherently discussed in a sufficiently broad and multidisciplinary manner. In this article, an international team presents an overview of the BDEM domain, highlighting a general framework and discussing key challenges from several perspectives. We introduce and summarize typical technologies and applications, organized into the six broad categories. Finally, we outline several directions of future research. 
    more » « less
  3. This paper addresses a gap in the AI governance literature in understanding collaboration between national governments and tribal nations in governing AI systems for emergency management. This conceptual work develops and presents a governance design framework for accountable AI systems to fill the knowledge gap by drawing from the fields of public administration, information systems, indigenous studies, and emergency management. This framework situates the governance framework in a cross-sovereignty historical, legal, and policy contexts. It captures the multi-level features and embeddedness of governance structures, including the levels of collaborative governance structure, software system governance rules, and technical software system design. The focal governance dynamics involve the collaborative process in the bi-directional relationship between governance rules and technical design for accountability and the feedback loop. The framework highlights the importance of multi-level and process considerations in designing accountable AI systems. Productive future research avenues include empirical investigation and resulting refinement of the framework and analytical rigor employing institutional grammar. 
    more » « less
  4. This paper is based on the analysis of data collected as part of a research conducted through National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 1760504 – RAPID: Disaster Preparedness and Response within Communities Affected by Hurricane Harvey. Our co-autoethnographic study focused on response and short-term recovery in Hurricane Harvey. It consisted of in-depth interviews conducted with emergency management officials, first responders, members of non-governmental organizations, civic leaders, spontaneous volunteers, and flooding victims coupled with an analysis of Crowdsource (spontaneously created virtual platform for citizens’ response) data. Our results point to the phenomenon of unstrapping identified across standard operating procedures, organizational arrangements, formal communication flows, formal emergency management processes, and resource utilization protocols. While unstrapping has been evidenced in our study to be perceived as threatening by emergency management and response entities, we adapt a complexity-informed worldview to propose unstrapping representing natural processes inherent to complex adaptive systems. Our study highlights unpredictability and change in human and organizational systems and give rise to self-organization, self-regulation that ultimately gives rise to resilience and adaptability. Implications for emergency management and policy are discussed. 
    more » « less
  5. Situation awareness plays an important role in disaster response and emergency management. Displaying real-time location-based social media messages along with videos, pictures, and hashtags during a disaster event could help first responders improve their situation awareness. A geo-targeted event observation (Geo) Viewer was developed for monitoring real-time social media messages in target areas with four major functions: (1) real-time display of geo-tagged tweets within the target area; (2) interactive mapping functions; (3) spatial, text, and temporal search functions using keywords, spatial boundaries, or dates; and (4) manual labeling and text-tagging of messages. Different from traditional web GIS maps, the user interface design of GeoViewer provides the interactive display of multimedia content and maps. The front-end user interface to visualize and query tweets is built with open source programming libraries using server-side MongoDB. GeoViewer is built for assisting emergency responses and disaster management tasks by tracking disaster event impacts, recovery activities, and residents’ needs in the target region. 
    more » « less