The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in huge amounts of confirmed cases and deaths both in the United States and globally. The nation experienced grave repercussions to citizens' lives, health, and the economy. Due to its high contagiousness, policies such as quarantine and lockdowns were put in place to slow the virus' rapid spread. Some major challenges are identifying vulnerable communities to provide immediate help and determining policies that are effective in slowing down the spread with minimal adverse effects on people's livelihood, mental health, and the economy. This project aims to develop tools that can locate communities in crisis, identify their problems and demands, and predict pandemic transmission trends and impacts in diverse communities based on mobility and social media data. The developed tools and technologies are critical for effective disaster management and pandemic recovery. Furthermore, pandemic and other natural disasters' co-occurrence is even more challenging given that mass evacuation and sheltering processes may cause a spike in cases of transmissible pandemic diseases. This project will develop new technologies that can aid emergency managers under a pandemic scenario based upon our previously developed tools for natural disaster management.
The proposed research provides potential solutions to solve crucial disaster information management challenges for COVID-19, future pandemics, and compound disasters while leveraging the team's previous work. Furthermore, the proposed techniques will help better understand the disaster situation to assist the preparation and recovery for a broad range of communities, including minority and low-income populations. This project will also have the potential to have societal and economic impacts by providing the most accurate information on pandemics and compound disasters to prevent unexpected losses. The developed solutions could be later expanded for other disaster and information management. This project fosters collaboration between the Florida International University (FIU) and the University of Tokyo, as well as institutions across the public and private sectors (including the cities of Miami-Dade, Florida, and Tokyo, Japan), to develop advanced techniques for effective emergency response and management for COVID-19, future pandemic, and compound disasters. This work's broader impact is aligned with the national goal of building smart and connected communities by developing innovative disaster information exchange and analysis tools with real-life data. In addition, FIU is one of the nation's leading minority-serving research universities and ranks first in awarding undergraduate and graduate degrees to Hispanic students. The research findings of this project will be disseminated through workshops, publications, and presentations.
This project is a joint collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the Japan Science and Technology Agency.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
Abstract
Shu-Ching Chen
Dr. Shu-Ching Chen is an Associate Director and an Eminent Scholar Chaired Professor in the School of Computing and Information Sciences (SCIS), Florida International University (FIU), Miami. He has been a Full Professor since August 2009 in SCIS at FIU. Prior to that, he was an Assistant/Associate Professor in SCIS at FIU from 1999. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1998, and Master's degrees in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Civil Engineering in 1992, 1995, and 1996, respectively, all from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
He is the Director of Distributed Multimedia Information Systems Laboratory (DMIS) and the Co-Director of the Integrated Computer Augmented Virtual Environment (I-CAVE). His main research interests include data science, multimedia big data, disaster information management, content-based image/video retrieval, and multimedia systems. Dr. Chen has authored and coauthored more than 330 research papers in journals, refereed conference/symposium/workshop proceedings, book chapters, and four books. Dr. Chen has been the PI/Co-PI of many research grants from NSF, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Homeland Security, Army Research Office, Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Florida Office of Insurance Regulation, IBM, and Florida Department of Transportation with a total amount of more than 33 millions.
Dr. Chen was named a 2011 recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist Award. He received the best paper awards from 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia and 2016 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration. He was awarded the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC) Society's Outstanding Contribution Award in 2005 and was the co-recipient of the IEEE Most Active SMC Technical Committee Award in 2006. He was also awarded the Top Scholar Award from FIU in 2011 and 2012, Inaugural Excellence in Graduate Mentorship Award from FIU in 2006, the University Outstanding Faculty Research Award from FIU in 2004, the Excellence in Mentorship Award from SCIS in 2010, the Outstanding Faculty Service Award from SCIS in 2004 and 2014, the Outstanding Faculty Research Award from SCIS in 2002, 2012, and 2017, and Director's Special Recognition Award from SCIS in 2016. He is a fellow of IEEE, AAAS, and SIRI.
He has been a General Chair and Program Chair for more than 60 conferences, symposiums, and workshops. He is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Multimedia Magazine, founding Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management, and Associate Editor/ Editorial Board of IEEE Trans. on Multimedia and IEEE Trans. on Human-Machine Systems. He served as the Chair of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing. He is Co-Chair of IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society's Technical Committee on Knowledge Acquisition in Intelligent Systems. Dr. Chen also has been a guest editor for more than ten journal special issues. He was a member of three steering committees (including IEEE Transactions on Multimedia) and several panels for conferences and NSF. He also serves/served as a member of technical program committee for more than 390 professional meetings. Dr. Chen is also the Co-Founder of Bay Area Multimedia Forum.
Performance Period: 10/01/2021 - 09/30/2024
Institution: Florida International University
Award Number: 2125165
Core Areas:
International
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