COBACORE at ISCRAM 2015

17th June 2015

‘Getting Ready for the Unexpected!’ was the theme of the ISCRAM 2015 Conference in Kristiansand, Norway.

ISCRAM – Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management – is a global forum for researchers, academics and policy makers from the emergency management field to share ideas and knowledge about these systems, to increase their effectiveness in the management of large-scale catastrophes.

Researchers working on disaster management projects share the findings from their work with each other in an effort to create information systems that will optimise the way major crises are handled.

Cobacore Team

The COBACORE team was represented by Stephen Purcell of Future Analytics Consulting, Martijn Neef and Paul Tilanus of Dutch research organisation TNO, and Josef Ristvej of Zilinska University in Slovakia.

Theme of conference

Topics addressed in the keynote speeches included uncertainty and assessing risk and data gathering in a disaster in addition to information systems, procedures and solutions.

Geospatial ICT support, research methods, ethical, social and legal narratives in IT design, decision support systems, the role of social media in crisis management and the effects of climate change on developing countries were also covered.

Other Projects

Other projects also funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)were also presented at the conference.

Among these was Irish-based Project Slándáil which aims to improve the use of social media to enhance the response of agencies to disasters.

FORTRESS Project aims to identify and understand cascading effects of a crisis by using evidence-based information from a range of previous crisis situations.

The UK coordinated POP-ALERT Project focuses on the technologies, procedures and methods that can be used to improve crisis responses and to take traditional crisis management a stop further.

ISCRAM EU Symposium

COBACORE was one of 19 European projects that were presented at the first ISCRAM EU Symposium on Wednesday, May 27, as part of an overview of the best European Research in Crisis Response and Management.

Team members from each project presented their objectives, ideas and results. The Symposium was a great opportunity to explore potential synergies and other opportunities for collaboration, or to discuss the most important trends and developments in research funding.