Prevention and response are key for cities to face any large-scale emergency (accidents, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, etc.).
Normally, this involves managing 4 phases:
- Mitigation: preventing threats from becoming disasters
- Planning: facing the disaster when it occurs
- Response: coordinating efforts for crisis situations
- Recovery: returning to normal as soon as possible.
The ubiquity of sensors, the internet, and networked mobile devices enable a new paradigm in which citizens monitor the environment through their mobile devices, collecting data (audio, video, location) both consciously and/or unconsciously. In this context, location-based services linked to social networks (Location-Based Social Networks, LBSN) emerge, allowing users to associate their position with physical locations (check-ins) and share them with their contacts.
The mass adoption of these services implies the availability of a vast amount of linked social and geographical data, whose spatial, temporal, and social analysis will allow the inference of user community patterns, traffic flows, emotions tied to groups, and, of course, the collection of evidence of potentially dangerous situations that will enable early detection of emergencies, as well as their proper and efficient management.
The Gradiant subproject (Credibility and safety) has two fundamental objectives for the success of the system and its acceptance in society:
- Ensure the reliability of the processed information for the early detection of emergency situations
- Ensure the privacy of citizens sharing their data in the system.
**EMRISCO** and **INRISCO** are coordinated projects formed by four subprojects, one for each team: UPC (coordinator), UVIGO, UC3M, and **Gradiant**.
EMRISCO has received funding from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the “Retos Investigación: Proyectos I+D+i 2013” call.
