Research and Design on Emergency Management and Information Visualisation

Doctoral Research with colleagues at Simon Fraser University and with the Emergency Management Center of Vancouver (2011-2012)

In the first three terms of my Ph.D. I had a cooperative Research Assistantship with Dr. Brian Fisher and Dr. Ron Wakkary. I worked in the field of Interaction Design and Visual Analytics (VA) for Emergency Management. We observed the entire planning process of the emergency management planning of the City of Vancouver for the “Celebration of Lights” event in the summer. We looked at the process from a design perspective and then looked into discovering and articulating challenges that could be addressed in future research. We collected and documented a lot of data to the Visual Analytics group at SIAT. I worked in collaboration with SIAT student Sara Salevati on this project.

Through further ethnographic observations during the GreyCup activations of the Vancouver Emergency Operation Center (EOC) I started prototyping a VA tool for Situational Awareness with the consideration of integrating social media as a source of information. The tool presented scenarios of how to present and interact with situational reports that are pulled together through gathered information from multiple sources, including social media.

We presented a poster about this research at ISCRAM2012 (Integrative and Analytical Approaches to Crisis Response and Emergency Management Information Systems).

Calderon, N, Hauser, S., and Bartram, L., “Addressing Situational Awareness Analytical Systems: an Information Visualization Approach,” In Poster abstracts of the 9th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management 2012 (ISCRAM 2012). Vancouver, Canada.