Community for Emergency Informatics

Interface Ecology Lab’s Team Coordination Game at Disaster City

robinmurphy — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:52:36 +0000

The Interface Ecology Lab designed the Team Coordination Game (TeC) to improve the safety of emergency responders and those they serve by studying firefighters at the Brayton Firefighter Training Field. The importance of coordinating saving lives in emergency response has grown in significance as a result of disasters including 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Ike, and earthquakes in Haiti and Japan. New technology and education through games offers the opportunity to improve responders’ capabilities. The digital TeC game is what we call a zero-fidelity simulation, that is, one that focuses on human-centered aspects of communication, such as stress, information sharing, and limited bandwidth, while skipping concrete aspects, such as fire and smoke. Post-Doctoral Researcher Zachary O. Toups and Ph.D. student William Hamilton design and develop the game, working closely with Principal Investigator Andruid Kerne, associate professor in the Texas A&M University Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The project has been supported by the Human-Centered Computing program of the National Science Foundation.

From April 11-15, a new level of deployment will bring the multi-player cooperative TeC game to Disaster City. TeC will be featured as a unit in the Collapse Rescue Operations course offered by the internationally renowned TEEX Disaster Preparedness and Response (DPR) and Urban Search and Rescue. Sixteen students will participate in this pilot deployment. The game is expected to teach the participants to work better and communicate more accurately. We will be working to validate the transferability hypothesis of zero-fidelity simulation: to show that a simulation derived from fire emergency response can also successfully teach team coordination to people working in other contexts. DPR chief Bob McKee said, “Learning how to better communicate is critically important for all emergency responders and disaster managers. The TeC Game provides each of our students and practitioners with a unique opportunity to learn as an individual and as a member of a team.”

For more information, please go to http://ecologylab.net/tec.

A National Initiative for Emergency Informatics

robinmurphy — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:18:02 +0000

http://cra.org/ccc/initiatives.php

Article on New Missions for A Sociotechnical Infrastructure co-authored by Mark in IEEE Spectrum

robinmurphy — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:01:36 +0000

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MC.2010.321

mini Summer Institute on IEDs covered in Unmanned Systems magazine

robinmurphy — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:28:33 +0000

Check out Unmanned Systems Vol. 28, no. 7, 2010, pg 12!

Scientists Use Social Networking To Study Spill

admin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:05:09 +0000

Texas A&M Corpus Christi researchers using Facebook to respond to the BP oil spill (http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/88/8824cover3.html)

Rescue Robots Tackle Disaster City: NIST Response Robot Evaluation Exercise 2010

admin — Mon, 24 May 2010 08:16:12 +0000

Published in May, 2010 vol 28 no 5 Unmanned Systems

HRRC director pitches RAVON proposal to president’s science, technology council

admin — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 08:07:32 +0000

Dr. Walt Peacock spoke to Subcommittee for Disaster Reduction, part of the President’s National Science and Technology Council at the White House Conference Center.

A presidential committee on disaster reduction learned about a proposal for a nationwide research initiative aimed at lessening the effects of natural disasters in an April 1 presentation from the director of Texas A&M’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center.

Read entire article here