Host: The UCI Center for Emergency Response Technologies (CERT)
When: Friday September 26th, 9:30am – 3:30pm
Where: UC Irvine, 4011 Donald Bren Hall, Irvine CA 92697

 

Researchers from the Center for Emergency Response Technologies (CERT) at UC Irvine are hosting a one day workshop on Emergency Information Dissemination in Schools to be held on the UC Irvine campus. We would like to invite you to participate in the workshop and provide us with your perspective on interesting and important issues in enabling fast and effective crisis information dissemination to the very diverse K-12 community in our state and nation.

CERT (www.cert.ics.uci.edu) was established to expand on the successes of the 5-year RESCUE-ITR program (www.itr-rescue.org) which concludes this year. Our highly interdisciplinary research team (with computer scientists, engineers, social scientists and disaster science experts) believes that providing timely and accurate information can significantly enhance the decision making abilities of response organizations and the public at large. We are working closely with our government and industrial partners to design and deliver next generation emergency management solutions that improve information flow in crisis response networks.

In this workshop we aim bring together school, city, county and state representatives and discuss the current processes, systems and challenges in disseminating emergency warnings and alerts in schools. Moreover, we would like to evaluate the extent to which recent and upcoming information and communication technologies can be customized to help the dissemination process in our schools to achieve the desired level of response.

We have two main goals for this meeting:

  1. To collect information about existing warning systems, processes, procedures for emergency warnings and alerts to schools that span different communities, populations and socioeconomic categories
  2. To envision the design of the next generation of technologies and processes to help educational institutions better prepare for disasters and effectively respond in real-time to emergencies.

As an outcome of this workshop we plan to move forward in the development of a short notice warning system (effective in the case of earthquakes, tornadoes, fires and flash floods) and specifically customize them for the school scenario. A longer term goal would be to explore the opportunity to engage our K-12 community to participate in pilot studies for testing these processes and systems.