Call for papers - Special issue on "Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction"

The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and its Domain Committee on Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction has the pleasure to announce a Call-for-Papers for the SPECIAL ISSUE on “IT IN DISASTER RISK REDUCTION: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES” in Information System Frontiers, A Journal of Research and Innovation by Springer.

Due to the effects of environmental changes, including global warming, we are facing an unexpected number of natural disasters and crises as well as their related consequences. We are also facing another era of Industrial Revolution: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) (including artificial intelligence (AI) and social media) are becoming more popular and are coming to be used in daily life. Yet, those technologies are not yet used fully in relief activities and in response to disasters.

International differences in information technology (IT) literacy as well as in IT equity might be among the reasons for this lack of use. In this journal, these issues are looked as well from the viewpoint of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.

The issues in IT in disaster risk reduction are of a multi-disciplinary nature and include various aspects of research areas such as information systems; IT; natural disaster sciences such as meteorology, social media, risk management, education, psychology and economics; and practical and strategic issues such as disaster management and policy making.

The aim of this special issue is to promote this multi-disciplinary area of research and development, and to encourage researchers and practitioners who work on information systems to look into disaster management as a promising application for various technologies.

By taking such perspectives, the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) set up the Domain Committee on IT in Disaster Risk Reduction (ITDRR) to promote this exciting area of research and development. The committee has held its annual workshop and conferences since 2016. We welcome papers based on the results from those events as well as other original sources.

Due to disaster risk reduction’s multidisciplinary nature, authors from various backgrounds - such as industry, diverse geographical and global settings, not-for-profit organisation backgrounds, agriculture, marine life, welfare, risk management, safety engineering and social networking services - will be included in this special issue.

Topics

The editors of this special issue solicit the submission of high-quality research papers concerning (but are not limited to) the following areas:

• advanced ICT including AI, big data, internet of things (IoT) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for disaster management
• climate informatics
• cloud computing and mobile computing in emergency management
• crowdsourcing and social media for emergency management
• disaster communications
• disaster information processing
• disaster relief, resilience and research
• disaster risk management capability assessment
• emergency preparedness
• risk management and risk governance
• disaster monitoring
• hazard and vulnerability analysis
• security and privacy issues in disaster management
• simulation and gaming for disaster management
• state-of-the art in the command and control room

We invite high-quality research papers which have neither been published previously nor are currently under consideration for publication in any other journal or conference. Survey papers of superior quality are also invited in this area.

Submission Instruction 

Paper submissions must conform to the format guidelines of Information Systems Frontiers available at: https://www.springer.com/journal/10796/updates/17193440.

Submissions should be approximately 32 pages double spaced including references.

Important dates 

Call for papers: October 31, 2019

Submission deadline: February 29, 2020

Notification of first round reviews: May 15, 2020

Revised Manuscripts due: July 10, 2020

Second Round Notification: September 18, 2020

Final Version Due: October 27, 2020

Final Acceptance Notification: November 20, 2020