2011 iscram summerschoolprogrambook

2011 ISCRAM Summer School on
Humanitarian Information Management
and Logistics

The case of the Haiti Earthquake

Program Book

August 17-26, 2011

TILBURG UNIVERSITY

Tilburg, the Netherlands

2011 ISCRAM Summer School Program

ISCRAM International Association ivzw
p/a Hermann Debrouxlaan 40
1160 Brussels - Belgium

Foundational Partners of the Summer School:

B-FAST, Belgium
Global Risk Forum GRF Davos
ICT4Peace Foundation
Institute for Disaster Prevention China
Joint Research Center of the Europan Commission
UN OCHA

2011 ISCRAM Summer School Program Directors:

Paulo Goncalves, Universita della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland
Bartel Van de Walle, Tilburg University, the Netherlands

2011 ISCRAM Summer School Local Organizing Team:

Janneke Liebregts – van Maarle
Ron de Milde
Jan Otten (chair)
Paul Pattynama

The 2011 ISCRAM Summer School is grateful for the financial support by the City of Tilburg, ICET,
Safety Region Midden- en West Brabant, TIAS-NIMBAS Business School, the Tilburg School of
Economics and Management, and the Information Management Department.

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2011 ISCRAM SUMMER SCHOOL PROGRAM BOOK

This version: August 10 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Practical Information: Daily schedule, Venue, Travel ............................................ 4
2. Program Overview ............................................................................................... 11
3. Participants .......................................................................................................... 15
4. Lecturers .............................................................................................................. 17
5. Lectures - short abstracts.................................................................................... 19

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1. Practical Information: Daily schedule, Venue, Travel

The fourth ISCRAM Summer School takes place at Tilburg University, from August 16
to 26 2011. The university website is: http://www.tilburguniversity.nl . The contact
person at the University is Mrs. Alice Kloosterhuis, Secretary Office of the
Department of Information Systems and Management. Mrs. Kloosterhuis can be
reached at +31 13 466 2188 during regular office hours.

On-site registration takes place on Wednesday, August 17 at Tilburg University, in
building K (Koopmans Building, the tallest building on the campus), Office K725 (in
Building K, see campus map below), from 10 am in the morning until 1 pm. At 1 pm,
lunch is offered at the student cafetaria.

The daily program consists of morning and afternoon lectures, focusing on theory
and practice. All lectures take place on campus in building T (the TIAS Building, see
campus map below) in room TZ2. All lectures start at 9:00 am, until noon. Lunch will
be held in the Student Cafeteria. The afternoon sessions start at 2 pm until the end
of the afternoon. Dinner will take place in various locations in town.

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 Tilburg and the Netherlands

With a population of nearly 200,000 inhabitants, Tilburg is the Netherlands' sixth
largest city and is located in the South of the country, close to the Belgian border, in
the Province of ‘North Brabant’.

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For more (tourist) information on the Netherlands and Tilburg, see for instance:

http://www.tilburg.nl/english/ep/home.do

http://www.vvvtilburg.nl/

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 From Schiphol Airport to Tilburg (Tilburg Central Train Station):

The easiest way is to take the train. For details on how to get from Schiphol to
Tilburg by train, see:

http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/contact/route/air.html

and here:

http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/contact/route/train.html

The Dutch Railways (NS or Nationale Spoorwegen) website is here:

http://www.ns.nl/ (choose English version).

 Hotel Address:

All participants at the Summer Schools are staying in hotel ‘De Postelse Hoeve’ which
is located in Tilburg.

Hotel Contact Information:

Hotel De Postelse Hoeve
Dr. Deelenlaan 10
5042 AD Tilburg

Phone: +31 13 4636335 (or 013 463 6335 when you are in the country)
Fax: +31 13 4639390

E-mail: info@depostelsehoeve.nl

http://www.depostelsehoeve.nl/

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 How to get from Tilburg Central train station (lower right flag on map) to De
Postelse Hoeve hotel (upper left flag on the map):

You can take a bus to the hotel, or a taxi. However, at the hotel, we have bikes
waiting for you (after all, this is Holland!) that you can use to get to the university.

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 How to get from Hotel De Postelse Hoeve (upper right flag on map) to Tilburg
University campus (lower left flag on map):

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 Map of Tilburg University Campus with all Buildings indicated:

Campus address: Warandelaan 2, 5000 LE Tilburg, the Netherlands.

 Contact Information Organizers:

During the Summer School, you can always contact Bartel:

Bartel Van de Walle:

Cell phone (any time): +32 479 45 7117
Home phone: +32 14 84 20 79
University office: +31 13 466 2016
Email: bartel@uvt.nl or bvdwalle@gmail.com

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2. Program Overview

All Summer School locations are on the Tilburg University campus. Please note that
the program may still be subject to last-minute changes.

Day 1: Wednesday, August 17 2011

Registration takes place at Tilburg University, building K, room K713 (room 13 on the
7th floor) between 10 am - 1pm, followed by a light lunch at 1 pm, and later that
afternoon a welcome reception offered by the University at 4 pm.

Important Notice: Bikes (yes, this is Holland!) will be waiting for you at the Hotel
upon your arrival on the 17th, so you can use your bike to get to the University for
the registration. A member of the organising team will be at the Hotel in the
morning to help you with the bikes, and hand over your bike. If you are arriving later,
you can get the keys for your bike at the hotel reception desk.

Time Location Activity

10 am – 1 pm K713 (Bartel’s office) On-site Registration
1 pm – 2 pm Student Cafetaria Light lunch
2 – 4 pm T-building, room TZ2 Introduction to the
Summer School: why are
we here?
4 – 6 pm Tilburry III (on Campus) Welcome Reception
offered by the
department of
Information Management

Day 2: Thursday, August 18 2011


9 am T-building – room TZ2 Haiti experiences: Geert
Gijs (B-FAST), Jen Janice
(TNT), Gerard De Groot
(Tilburg University)
12:30 – 2 pm Student Cafeteria Lunch
2 – 5pm T-building – room TZ2 Making Sense of it all, by
Chris Ansell, Berkeley

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University, USA
7 pm Dinner Museum of Textiles,
Tilburg

Day 3: Friday, August 19 2011


9 am T-building – room TZ2 GDACS: the Global
Disaster Alerting and
Communication System
by Tom De Groeve, JRC
Ispra
12 – 1 pm Student Cafeteria Lunch
1 – 4 pm T-building – room TZ2 Early Warning and more
by Ioannis Dokas, UCC
Cork, Ireland
4 – 6 pm T-building – room TZ2 USAR, by Peter Bos
7 pm Restaurant Dinner in Café Karel,
Tilburg

Day 4: Saturday, August 20 2011


9 am Hotel Postelse Hoeve Design Workshop by
Jonas Landgren, IT
University, Gothenburg,
Sweden
12 – 1 pm Hotel Postelse Hoeve Lunch
Afternoon Brewery Beer tasting at Brewery
(Tilburg)
Evening Barbeque

Day 5: Sunday, August 21 2011

Day off – time to explore the Netherlands!

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Day 6: Monday, August 22 2011


9 am T-building – room TZ2 Humanitarian
Information
Management in Haiti
(Andrew Alspach, UN
OCHA)
1 – 4 pm T-building – room TZ2 Geographical
Information Systems
(Beate Stollberg, JRC
Ispra)
4 – 6 pm T-building – room TZ2 Geographical
Information Systems in
the Field (Naomi Morris)
7 pm Restaurant Dinner at La Cabana,
Tilburg

Day 7: Tuesday, August 23 2011


9 am T-building – room TZ2 The logistics of
Humanitarian Operations
(Robin Mays, USA)
1 – 3 pm T-building – room TZ2 Lecture by Rene Moraal
(training, Falck NL)
3 – 6 pm T-building – room TZ2 Crisis Information
Management (Sanjana
Hattutowa, ICT4Peace)
7 pm Restaurant Dinner at Peerke
Donders, Tilburg

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Day 8: Wednesday, August 24 2011


9 am T-building – room TZ2 Crisis Information
Management (Sanjana
Hattutowa, ICT4Peace)
12 – 1 pm Student Cafeteria
1 – 5 pm T-building – room TZ2 Health Challenges (Jules
Pieters, WHO)
7 pm Restaurant Dinner at La Grotta,
Tilburg

Day 9: Thursday, August 25 2011


9 am Hotel De Postelse Hoeve Leaving for exercise day
in Belgium

Day 10: Friday, August 26 2011


9 am T-building – room TZ2 Closing Session
12 – 1 pm Student Cafeteria Farewell Lunch

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3. Participants

Andersson, Dennis
FOI
Sweden

Bo, Tao
Earthquake Administration
China

Castaneda Acevedo, Jaime Andres
University of Lugano
Switzerland

Defree, Dimitri
Crisis Management Service, Health Department
Belgium

Desjardins, Janie
Pearson Peacekeeping Center
Canada

Granasen, Magdalena
FOI
Sweden

Gupta, Kailash
University of North Texas
USA

Harrington, Bekky-Jay
Nepal Ministry of Home Affairs
Nepal

Ho, Joanne
University of Washington
USA

Jiang, Jingui
Harbin Engineering University
China

Kluckner, Sigmund
University of Stuttgart
Germany

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Lebak, Adolf
CBRN Defense Center of Excellence
Czech Republic

Lendholt, Matthias
GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences
Germany

Mollmann, Stefan
Karlsruher Institute of Technology
Germany

Moshtari, Mohammed
University of Lugano
Switzerland

Rane, Sanjay
UN OCHA
Kenya

Roy, Priyanka
University of Aston
UK

Sun, Youwei
China Institute of Disaster Prevention
China

Villaveces, Jeffrey
UN OCHA
Colombia

Widera, Adam
University of Munster
Germany

Zhang, Tao
National Earthquake Response Service
China

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4. Lecturers

Alspach, Andrew
UN OCHA
Switzerland

Ansell, Chris
Department of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley
USA

Bos, Peter
USAR
The Netherlands

De Groeve, Tom
Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen
Support to External Security
Joint Research Centre of the European Commission

Dokas, Ioannis
Cork Constraint Computation Center
University College Cork
Ireland

Gijs, Geert
Proces Manager Operations
Emergency Planning & Disaster Relief
Coordinator B-FAST
Incident and Crisis Management
Federal Public Service Health
Belgium

Hattotuwa, Sanjana
ICT4Peace
Switzerland

Landgren, Jonas
IT University and Gothenburg University
Sweden

Mays, Robin
University of Washington
USA

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Moraal, Rene
Falck NL
The Netherlands

Morris, Naomi
Livelihoods Program Manager - Pakistan - Acted
Humanitarian Project Manager - Roaming - MapAction

Pieters, Jules
WHO
Switzerland

Ribbers, Piet
Tilburg University
The Netherlands

Stollberg, Beate
Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen
Support to External Security
Joint Research Centre of the European Commission

van den Herik, Jaap
Tilburg University
The Netherlands

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5. Lectures - short abstracts (when available)

Christopher Ansell, Making Sense of it All

This lecture will provide an introduction to the literature on sensemaking, as developed by
Karl Weick and others. This literature emphasizes the way that decisionmakers extract and
interpret cues from their information environment and how this sensemaking is an on-going
process. The lecture will then focus on how sensemaking is affected by four variables: the
distributed character of decisionmaking and action; the uncertainty and ambiguity of
information environments; the time pressures inherent in high-tempo events; and the
knowledge-intensiveness of decisionmaking. Examples from a range of cases will be used as
illustrations, but the lecture will investigate two cases closely in order to draw attention to
challenges of effective sensemaking. The British response to the outbreak of mad cow
disease will illustrate how cues are primed by historical experience and professional and
institutional context. The global response to the H1N1 pandemic will them be explored to
show how formal mechanisms of information-sharing and planning can unintentionally
subordinate vital contextual information and circumscribe the on-going character of
sensemaking. The lecture will conclude with a discussion of some of the ways that
decisionmakers might be provided with “sensemaking support.”

Stollberg, Beate, GIS

Analysts in international situation rooms have the difficult task of making sense of a very
dynamic stream of information from multiple sources with various degrees of reliability,
such as media reports, crowd sourcing data, volunteered geographic information, social
networking, email, expert reports and sensor data. Most of this information is associated to
location and can thus be mapped, providing an integrating platform for heterogeneous data.
A wide range of mapping tools is available, ranging from professional Geographical
Information System (GIS) enterprise solutions to lightweight web-based maps and the Open
Source community is very actively developing new Web Mapping software.

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are a powerful tool for the analysis of large amounts
of data about a location. Situational awareness for crisis management is based on the
location of a disaster and has additional constraints: information is real-time and uncertain,
analysis is performed under time pressure, and unexpected elements are typical. While GIS
can help supporting situational awareness and decision making, it must be used in the right
way.
If GIS expertise and equipment are available within an organization, complex Spatial Data
Infrastructures (SDI) can be designed to support many crisis information management tasks.
However, such expertise and infrastructure is expensive, and low-cost alternatives are
becoming more powerful. The availability of on-line geospatial Web Services providing
global base maps, gazetteer functions and some analytical capabilities (such as routing) is
increasing. Mash-ups can provide suitable solutions for some crisis management tasks, in
particular if analytical tasks are limited and it is more important to be able to visualize data
from multiple sources on the same map.
This lecture will give an introduction to GIS, Web Mapping tools and geographic standards in
general, the usage of them in situation rooms during a crisis and an illustration of future
trends in this field. In more particular, the tasks carried out in the Crisis Management

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Laboratory at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission after the earthquake in
Haiti will be presented.

Ioannis Dokas, Early Warning Systems and Systems Safety

The devastating consequences of natural and man – made disasters have brought a global
attention to the need of being proactive and resilient. Over the last years, especially after
the first Global Early Warning conference which, was organised by the UN in Postdam
Germany in 1998, significant efforts to improve the effectiveness of early warning systems
have been made. These efforts are mainly focused around EWS for Natural Disasters.
Unfortunately, inadequate attention is given to EWS for man – made disasters. In this
Lecture I will discuss the elements that constitute an effective early warning system and I
will briefly describe the different types of EWS that exist. Furthermore I will discuss the
challenges which emerge when it is to design an EWS. Emphasis will be given to EWS for
manmade disasters. Therefore, basic concepts and methods from the domain of systems
safety will be presented and explained.

Jonas Landgren, Design Workshop

My plan for the summer school is to talk about Design and our role as designers of
technology use for citizen response and crisis preparedness. The day will start with a 3* 45
min lectures on design, field research and prototyping. This will be based on the Human
Centered Design Method from IDEO.com and experiences from my own fieldwork.

The afternoon will include a field study where the students go out in the city of Tilburg. Their
task is to make a series of observations and short interviews in order to get material to
formulate design ideas for Citizen crisis preparedness. The output from this afternoon will be
a set of proposals describing how IT could improve the citizens ability to collaborate with the
authorities in case of crises and large scale accidents.

Tom De Groeve: From mash-ups to modelling: technology for crisis situation awareness

Large catastrophes often trigger international humanitarian response. This is a particular
context in which many independent actors, including governmental agencies (e.g. search
and rescue teams), non-governmental organizations (NGO’s such as Doctors Without
Borders), corporations (e.g. Google or Microsoft) and international organizations (including
the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) work together to
provide first response and subsequent relief and reconstruction assistance. In the absence of
a clear command and control structure, situational awareness needs to be acquired by each
actor independently. Needless to say that this community is eager to develop and use
technology and systems to acquire and share information, and that collaboration and
information sharing is generally considered as mutually benefitting.

In the early onset of disasters, information is sparse. Traditionally, there are three main
sources of information: scientific monitoring systems (e.g. seismological or meteorological
networks), official information (briefings by the local emergency management agency) and
media reports. Information management for each source requires different technological
solutions, respectively focused on modelling, web portals for information sharing, and

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linguistic processing. However, more recently a fourth source of information is becoming
available through Web 2.0: information from citizens, sometimes labelled crowd-sourcing. In
case of a disaster, local (and remote) citizens can and do provide information (e.g.
eyewitness reports) or analysis (e.g. compiling reports in an information feed). However, this
fourth source is not widely used yet by emergency managers because the reliability of the
information is not well understood and hard to assess in a time-critical environment.

My lecture will address three different topics in this context:

- Mash-ups: combining information from the Web. Based on the experience of the Joint
Research Centre, the principles and advantages of mash-ups in crisis response is shown.
Technology and data sources are reviewed, and research challenges highlighted. The
following example is used: http://dma.jrc.it/map.

- Modelling: information from various sources can be combined using scientific models to
derive new knowledge. In particular for sudden onset disasters, real-time characteristics
of the event can be combined with knowledge about the location of the event to derive
impact on population. Technology, models and data sources are reviewed, and research
challenges highlighted. The following example is used: http://www.gdacs.org.

- Volunteered Geographic Information and collaborative mapping. Creating geographic
information, whether it is for base maps or to map damage, is time consuming, but not
necessarily difficult. Tools are emerging to allow collaborative mapping, such as
OpenStreetMap or Google Map Maker. Technology and data sources are reviewed, and
research challenges highlighted. The following example is used:
http://www.openstreetmap.org.

Sanjana Hattotuwa, Crisis Information Management

This lecture is aimed at individuals interested in humanitarian coordination who are
interested in learning more about the role of information management, and how it
contributes to the decision-making process. In this lecture, you will find a general overview
of what information management is, and what its aims and objectives are. The course will
flag cutting-edge platforms and tools now in use for crisis information management, within
and outside the UN system and the role that information management can play in the
process of informed decision-making. The skills learnt can apply to a much wider context,
including peacekeeping and peacebuilding.

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