ISCRAM med 2014 Conference
Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management
in Mediterranean countries
15th to the 17th October 2014, Toulouse, France
ISCRAM

News

Program is available here!

Proceedings are available here !

Participants will have the opportunity to attend presentations made by renowned keynote speakers:

Sihem Amer-Yahia

Alexis Drogoul

Laurent Franck

About the conference

The aim of ISCRAM-med is to bring together researchers and practitioners working in the area of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. The conference will focus on Mediterranean crises but remains open to crises in other areas. It invites research and demo papers.

Many crises have occurred in recent years around the Mediterranean Sea. For instance, we can mention political crises such as the Arabic Spring (Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, ...), the economic crisis in Spain and Greece, earthquakes in Italy, fires in France and Spain, riots in French suburbs or even the explosion of the chemical plant AZF in Toulouse. Some of them even had a domino effect on others.

Also, the shared history between the Mediterranean countries and common geo-political issues led to solidarity among people and cross-country military interventions. This observation proves the importance of considering some of these crises in this region at a Mediterranean level rather than as isolated phenomena. If researchers working on crises that occurred in these countries have made work, often limited to a country or to a class of crises, it becomes appropriate now to exchange and share information and knowledge about the course and management of these crises and also to get the point of view of stakeholders, practitioners and policy makers.


Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

Conference topics

Topics include but are not limited to

  • Analytical Modelling and Simulation
  • Social Media Observation
  • Crisis Ontology
  • Community Engagement in Crisis Informatics Research
  • Command and Control Studies
  • Decision Support Systems
  • Disaster Relief Supply Chain Management
  • Information System Interoperability and Inter-organizational issues
  • Ethical, Legal and Social Issues of IT Supported Emergency Response
  • Geographic Information Science
  • Humanitarian Information Systems
  • Intelligent Systems
  • Planning, Foresight and Risk Analysis
  • Practitioner Cases and Practitioner- Centered Research
  • Serious Games for Crisis Management
  • Visual Analytics for Crisis Management

Submission

All paper submissions must make a new and significant contribution to the body of knowledge on information systems for emergency management, support their contribution with valid arguments, and be clearly structured and well written. ISCRAM2014 invites two categories of papers:

  • Research papers presenting valid, original, relevant cutting edge research that will be reviewed to the highest academic standards. Reviewing will pay additional attention to the application of the related scientific literature and theory, to the use of an appropriate research methodology, and to technical, mathematical and statistical correctness.
  • Demo papers presenting new developments in emergency management and policy making, discussing approaches, methods, tools, (best) practices and standards. These papers should focus on practical issues and concerns and raise challenges for future research, and will be reviewed to the highest practice-oriented standards.

All papers (10-14 pages, LNCS format) should be written in English and submitted electronically in PDF format through the conference system

To download the LNCS format

LATEX format
WORD format 

Every submitted paper will be evaluated by at least three members of the program committee.
Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings, to appear in the Springer series “Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing” (LNBIP).

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

Important dates

  • Abstract : ASAP
  • Due date for papers submission: April 30, 2014, May 25, 2014
  • Final acceptance : May 30, 2014, June 18, 2014
  • Camera-ready paper due: June 28, 2014
  • Conference: 15th to the 17th October 2014.

Conference organizers

  • Chihab HANACHI (general chair), University Toulouse 1 Capitole (UT1C), France
  • Frédérick Benaben (program chair), Ecole des Mines Albi Carmaux, France
  • François Charoy (program co-chair), Uniniversity of Lorraine, France

Program committee

  • Andrea Omicini,Universita di Bologna, Italy
  • Athman Bouguettaya, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
  • Narjes Bellamine, University of Tunis, Tunisia
  • Ghassan Beydoun, University of New South Wales, Australia
  • Hamid Mcheick, University Québec at Chicoutimi, Canada
  • Monica Divitini, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
  • Pedro Antunes, University of Lisboa, Portugal
  • Marouane Kessentini, University of Michigan, USA
  • Ricardo Rabelo, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil
  • Matthieu Lauras, Ecole des Mines d'Albi, France
  • Carlos Castillo , Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
  • Emilia Balas, Aurel VlaicuUniv. of Arad, Romania
  • Lotfi Bouzguenda, University of Sfax, Tunisia
  • Julie Dugdale, Universitè Pierre Mendès France, France
  • Ling Tang,Beijing University of Chemical technology, China
  • Mohammed Erradi, ENSIAS, Rabat, Marocco
  • Laurent Franck, Telecom Bretagne, France
  • Muhammad Imran, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
  • Francis Rousseaux, University of Reims, France
  • Rui Jorge Tramontin Jr., Santa Catarina State University, Brasil
  • Youcef Baghdadi, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
  • Elyes Lamine, Ecole des Mines d'Albi, France
  • Sebnem Duzgun, Turkey, Middle Est Techical University, Ankara, Turkey
  • Shady Elbassuoni, American University of Beirut, Lebanon
  • Nouali-Taboudjemat Nadia, Algiers
  • Silvia Ciotti, Eurocrime, Italy
  • Yiannis Verginadis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
  • Jamal Bentahar, Concordia University, Canada
  • Serge Stinckwich, IRD, France
  • Sanja Vranes, Institute Mihajlo Pupin, Belgrade, Serbia
  • Selmin Nurcan, University Paris 1, France
  • Gerhard Wickle, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
  • Paloma Diaz Perez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.

Local organization

  • Hadj Batatia, INPT, Toulouse
  • Françoise Adreit, UT2, Toulouse
  • Sebastien Truptil, EMAC, Toulouse
  • Stéphanie Combettes, UPS, Toulouse
  • Eric Andonoff, UT1C, Toulouse
  • Benoit Gaudou, UT1C, Toulouse
  • Thanh Le, UIT1, Toulouse
  • Sameh Triki, UT1C, Toulouse
  • Ines Thabet, Tunis
  • Mohamed Chaawa, Tunis

Keynote speakers

Sihem Amer-Yahia

Resume

Sihem Amer-Yahia is DR1 CNRS at LIG in Grenoble where she leads the SLIDE team. Her interests are at the intersection of large-scale data management and data analytics. Before joining CNRS, she was Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, Senior Scientist at Yahoo! Research and at&t Labs. Sihem has served on the SIGMOD Executive Board, is a member of the VLDB and the EDBT Endowments. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the VLDB Journal for Europe and Africa and is on the editorial boards of TODS and the Information Systems Journal. She is currently serving as PC chair of BDA 2015 and of SIGMOD Industrial 2015. Sihem received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Paris-Orsay and INRIA in 1999, and her Diplôme d’Ingénieur from INI, Algeria.

Title

Task Assignment Optimization in Crowdsourcing (and its applications to crisis management)

Abstract

A crowdsourcing process can be viewed as a combination of three components worker skill estimation, worker-to-task assignment, and task accuracy evaluation. The reason why crowdsourcing today is so popular is that tasks are small, independent, homogeneous, and do not require a long engagement from workers. The crowd is typically volatile, its arrival and departure asynchronous, and its levels of attention and accuracy variable. In most systems, Mechanical Turk, Turkit, Mob4hire, uTest, Freelancer, eLance, oDesk, Guru, Topcoder, Trada, 99design, Innocentive, CloudCrowd, and CloudFlower, task assignment is done via a self-appointment by workers. I will argue that the optimization of worker-to-task assignment is central to the effectiveness of a crowdsourcing platform and present a uniform framework that allows to formulate worker-to-task assignment as a series of optimization goals with different goals including addressing misinformation and rumor in crisis reporting.

Alexis Drogoul

Resume

Alexis Drogoul graduated in AI in 1990 and received his PhD. degree from the Univ. of Paris 6 in 1993. Recruited in 1995 as associate professor, he became full professor in 2000 and joined the IRD as senior researcher in 2004, in the UMMISCO International Research Unit (UMI 209 UMMISCO). He is working on agent-based simulation of complex systems, mainly by contributing to the development of the GAMA platform (https://code.google.com/p/gama-platform) but also by participating to interdisciplinary applied projects. Since 2007, he is working in Vietnam to both enhance the research capacity of Vietnamese partners for designing models for environmental decision-support systems and explore the use of agent-based models in development aid projects, principally on urban resilience.

Title

Simulating the past to better manage the present: geo-historical modeling of past catastrophes in the ARCHIVES project

Abstract

It is now widely accepted that the adaptation of human communities to natural hazards is partly based on a better understanding of similar past events and of the measures undertaken by impacted groups to adapt to them. This “living memory” has the potential to improve their perception of the risks associated to these hazards and, hopefully, to increase their resilience to them. However, it requires that: (1) data related to these hazards are accessible; (2) relevant information can be extracted from it; (3) “narratives” can be reconstructed from these information; (4) they can be easily shared and transmitted. This is classically the task of archivists and historians to make sure that these conditions are fulfilled. The goal of ARCHIVES is to propose a methodology that would enable to fulfill them in a systematic and automated way, from the analysis of documents to the design of realistic geo-historical computer models. Our aim is that, using these models, users can both visualize what happened and explore what could have happened in alternative “what-if” scenarios. Our claim is that this tangible, albeit virtual, approach to historical “fictions” will provide researchers with a novel methodology for synthesizing large corpuses of documents and, at the same time, become a vector for transmitting lessons from past disasters to a contemporary audience.

The broad applicative context of ARCHIVES is the study of floods management in Vietnam over the past centuries, which is still a crucial question because these events can be devastating. Opposite strategies have been used in the two deltas that structure the country: while the North has put the accent on the construction of dykes to stem the Red River, the South has adapted by digging a dense network of canals in the Mekong River delta. And, despite the political upheavals undergone by the country in the last centuries, during the Nguyễn dynasty (1802-1945), the French colonization (1865-1954), the independence (1955) or the reform policy (đổi mới, 1986), these strategies have remained virtually unchanged. Their permanence raises the question of the social and environmental determinants that led to their design and how they are understood by contemporary stakeholders, heirs of radically different choices made centuries ago.

In order to evaluate the feasibility of the whole project, the French and Vietnamese partners of ARCHIVES have worked on a limited case study from January to July 2013, part of the preparation of the “Tam Dao Summer School” (http://www.tamdaoconf.com), during which a one-week training session was delivered on “Modeling the past to better manage the present: an initiation to the geo-historical modeling of past risks”. The case study concerned the flooding of the Red River in July 1926 and its impact on Hanoi. Our work was based on (1) the analysis of the colonial archives stored in Hanoi, (2) previous historical researches carried out on this event, (3) the reuse of hydrodynamic and social models developed by partners, and (4) the use of GAMA to build simulation prototypes. This first attempt demonstrated the potential of this approach for historians and users of the model, allowing them to not only visualize this event in a new way, but to also explore fictional scenarios, which helped them in gaining a deeper understanding of the social and environmental dynamics of the flooding.

Laurent Franck

Resume

Laurent Franck is professor at Telecom Bretagne and the head of the Toulouse site. He has master degrees in computer science and social sciences and a PhD in satellite communications [1]. He teaches satellite communications and networking to final year engineering students [2]. His research activities target the use of satellite communications for daily emergencies and disaster management. He’s currently challenged by two questions: (a) how to make satellite communications affordable during emergencies and (b) how to properly capture and model responders' behaviour for the purpose of networking research activities.
Laurent is IEEE senior member and an active member of the ETSI SES/SatEC standardisation working group [3] that he chaired for a two-year mandate. Since 13 years, he is an active first aid volunteer with the French Red Cross and a trainer. He has been involved in emergency operations following the AZF chemical plant explosion and later he prepared, coordinated and took part to rescue operations. He’s passionate about emergency management and first aid. Besides these activities, Laurent enjoys running, cross-country skiing and beer homebrewing.

[1] http://fr.linkedin.com/in/laurentfranck
[2] http://spacecomm.wp.mines-telecom.fr
[3] http://portal.etsi.org/tb.aspx?tbid=676&SubTB=676

Title

Revisiting the Möbius strip: where emergency field practices and research activities meet

Abstract

In this keynote, we will discuss about emergency communications both from field practitioner and researcher standpoints. We’ll see how these two stances may contradict. Field practitioners tend to be conservative, for the sake of effectiveness. Researchers, by definition, push forward new telecommunication paradigms, calling to revisit current practices in order to improve them (or so, they believe).

In this battle between the “keep it simple” and the “make it better”, we will fight our way taking as study case the use of satellite communications during emergencies. What are the current practice? What are the opportunities and the possible implementations? How to strike the right balance between operational constraints and technological advances?

Conference program


Wednesday 15 October 2014
08:00 - 09:00 Registration
09:00 - 09:30 Opening (room MS001)
09:30 - 10:30 Keynote - Alexis Drogoul - Simulating the past to better manage the present: geo-historical modeling of past catastrophes in the ARCHIVES project
10:30 - 11:00 Prepardeness
1:  
Supply chain and distribution
break
11:00 - 11:30 A Location-Allocation Model for More Consistent Humanitarian Supply Chains - M. Lauras, J. Vargas, L. Dupont, A. Charles
11:30 - 12:00 Towards Large-scale Cloud-based Emergency Management Simulation "SimGenis Revisited" - C. Labba, N. Bellamine Ben Saoud, K. Chine
12:00 - 13:30 LUNCH
(room ME001)
13:30 - 14:00 Prepardeness 2: 
Modeling and training
Approaches to optimize local evacuation maps for helping evacuation in case of tsunami - V.-M. Le, Y. Chevaleyre, J.-D. Zucker, H. Tuong Vinh
14:00 - 14:30 EDIT: a methodology for the treatment of non-authoritative data in the reconstruction of disaster scenarios - S. Traverso, V. Cerutti, K. Stock, M. Jackson
14:30 - 15:00 Towards a Decision Support System for Security Analysis: Application to Railroad Accidents - A. Maalel, L. Mekri, H. Hadj-Mabrouk, H. Ben Ghézela
15:00 - 15:30 break
15:30 - 16:00 Crisis mobility of pedestrians: from survey to modelling, lessons from Lebanon and Argentina - E. Beck, J. Dugdale, H. Van Truong, C. Adam
16:00 - 16:30 Supporting debriefing with sensor data: a reflective approach to crisis training - S. Mora, M. Divitini
16:30 - 18:00 Demo session Room MS002
18:30 - 19:40
BOAT TRIP along the river Garonne and the Canal du Midi

Departure at « Quai Saint-Pierre »


Thursday 16 October 2014
08:30 - 09:00 Registration
09:00 - 10:00 Keynote - Laurent Franck - Revisiting the Möbius strip: where emergency field practices and research activities meet
10:00 - 10:30 Response 1: Human interactions on crisis field break
10:30 - 11:00 Citizen Participation and social technologies: exploring the perspective of emergency organizations - P. Diaz, I. Aedo, S. Herranz
11:00 - 11:30 Access Control Privileges Management for Risk Areas - M. Fugini, M. Teimourikia
11:30 - 12:00 A Formal Modeling Approach for Emergency Crisis response in Health during Catastrophic Situation - M. Ouzzif, M. Hamdani, H. Mountassir, M. Erradi
12:00 - 12:30 Collaborative re-ordering in Humanitarian aid networks - S. Vidolov
12:30 - 14:00 LUNCH
(room MS002)
14:00 - 14:30 Response 2: Coordination and agility Towards Better Coordination of Rescue Teams in Crisis Situations: a Promising ACO Algorithm - J. Mahdjoub, F. Rousseaux, E. Soulier
14:30 - 15:00 A Multi-Agent Organizational Model for a Snow Storm Crisis Management - I. Thabet, M. Chaawa, L. Ben Said
15:00 - 15:30 Agility of crisis response: from adaptation to forecast. Application to a French rod crisis management use case - A.-M. Barthe-Delanoë, G. Macé Ramète, F. Bénaben
15:30 - 16:00 break
16:00 - 16:30 The Dewetra Platform: a multi-perspective architecture for risk management during emergencies - Italian Civil Protection Department, CIMA Research Foundation
16:30 - 17:00 Decision Support for Disaster Risk Management: Integrating Vulnerabilities into Early-Warning Systems - T. Comes, B. Mayag, E. Negre
20:00-23:00 GALA DINNER




Friday 17 October 2014
08:30 - 09:00 Registration
09:00 - 10: 00 Keynote - Sihem Amer-Yahia - Task Assignment Optimization in Crowdsourcing (and its applications to crisis management)
10:00 - 10:30 Social aspects   in crisis management break
10:30 - 11:00 Integration of emotion in evacuation simulation - V. Tho Nguyen, D. Longin, H. Tuong Vinh, B. Gaudou
11:00 - 11:30 Emotional Agent Model for Simulating and Studying the Impact of Emotions on the Behaviors of Civilians during Emergency Situations - M. Belhaj, F. Kebair, L. Ben Said
11:30 - 12:00 Emergency Situation Awareness: Twitter Case Studies - R. Power, B. Robinson, J. Colton, M. Cameron
12:00 - 13:30 LUNCH
13:30 - 14:30 CLOSING SESSION: ISCRAM Community - future of ISCRAMMED  

Venue

CONFERENCE VENUE

 The ISCRAMMED conference venue is at the city centre of Toulouse :

University Toulouse 1 Capitole
Manufacture des Tabacs
21 Allée de Brienne
31000 TOULOUSE

(Building S)


Getting from the Blagnac airport to the city-centre:

Airport Shuttle: the easiest way is to take the "navette" (the airport bus) that runs every 20 minutes and has several stops in the city center. Single fare: 5 euros. The nearest stop from the conference venue is "Compans Caffarelli".
By taxi: 20 minutes drives to the city center - 30 to 35 euros.

From Matabiau train Station:

Metro A: direction"Basso Cambo". Change at "Jean-Jaurès".
Metro B: direction "Borderouge". Stop at compans Caffarelli.

HOTELS

There is no official hotel for ISCRAMMED 2014.
Nearest hotels are available HERE.
Visit the following web site http://www.toulouse-visit.com to get more choices. The following landmarks might be useful to find a hotel nearby the conference location: “Capitole”, “Centre”.

Registration


REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN HERE

Notice to authors only
you must be duly registered at the conference by July 25th, otherwise your contribution will not be included into the proceedings.

To Make your Registration

First connect HERE to create an account and enter general information and your category (senior, phd students, ...). 
You will then receive a login and password for payment.

The fees cover coffee breaks, lunches, gala dinner and conference proceedings.

 

Early registration
(up to15/09/2014)

Late registration
(after 15/09/2014)

 

Fees

Senior

450€

500€

PhD Students

300€

350€

Senior, ISCRAM Members

400€

450€

PhD Students, ISCRAM Members

250€

300€

 

Fees for Accompanying Persons

Gala Dinner

60€

To Pay

  • CREDIT CARD: to proceed to an online secured payment (PayBox) please connect again HERE and click on "PayOnline" anf follow the instructions.



  • Purchase order ("Bon de commande" only for French companies): 
    1. connect again HERE  and just click on "Pay by Order Form". You may then leave the payment system.
    2. fill in your  own purchase order form.
    3. send a copy of your purchase order to iscrammed@ut-capitole.fr

some useful information about our university
Name: University Toulouse 1 Capitole (UT1C)
SIRET: 193 113 826 000 13
Code NAF (APE): 8542 Z
VAT number: FR66139113826



  • Bank transfer
    1. Contact us at iscrammed@ut-capitole.fr to receive all the information about our bank account (Bank Identifier Code, International Bank Account Number, …). 
    2. Please mention "ISCRAMMED" and the name of your institution in the reference of your bank transfer order.
    3. Send us a copy of  your bank transfer order.

        Payment by bank transfer will not be allowed after September 15th, 2014.


For registration queries

you may send an email at  iscrammed@ut-capitole.fr
We will confirm your registration by email once your registration is complete and your payment is made.

Contact

Please contact Chihab HANACHI (Chihab DOT Hanachi AT univ-tlse1 DOT fr) for further enquiries about the conference.