Final Report Summary - ATHENA (ATHENA)
Executive Summary:
The public are under-utilized crisis responders; they are often first on the scene, vastly outnumber the emergency first responders and are creative and resourceful. In a crisis, the public self-organise into voluntary groups, adapt quickly to changing circumstances, emerge as leaders and experts and
perform countless life-saving actions; and they are increasingly reliant upon the use of new communications media to do it. ATHENA will help them by joining their conversations and adding an enabling voice. ATHENA will give them the information they ask for, in a way they can understand. ATHENA will assist them in targeting their actions, by directing them to the places they need to be
and away from danger. ATHENA will identify emergent behaviour that is beneficial and provide support with agency resources to develop that behaviour. The public have an extraordinary ability to adapt in a crisis, because it can mean the difference between life and death. ATHENA will help the
public help themselves by empowering them with their own collective intelligence and the means by which they can exploit that intelligence. ATHENA will provide the emergency services with new realtime
intelligence from crowd-sourced information, greatly assisting in their decision-making processes and making search and rescue more efficient. ATHENA will create a fundamental and permanent shift in the way crisis situations are managed; helping the public as victim to turn into the public as part of the crisis team. ATHENA will utilise social media and smart mobile devices as part of a shared and interoperable two-way communication platform. By developing an orchestrated cycle of data, information and knowledge, ATHENA will empower both the public and emergency services with the intelligence they need in dealing with a crisis.
ATHENA will move forward the state of art in two broad areas:
- Social Media and Crisis Communication: The use of social media in crises by LEAs, police, first responders, and the public
- Technologically exploiting social media in crisis management: The, searching, acquisition, aggregation, filtering and presentation of knowledge from social media to support crisis management using smart and mobile devices, development of guidelines and best practices for proactive public / LEA collaborative emergency and crisis management engagement
Project Context and Objectives:
The ATHENA project brings together major user communities with world leading experts in crisis management and experts and technology developers of mobile and social media use and development. The goal of the ATHENA project is to deliver two major outputs that will enable and encourage users of new media to contribute to the security of citizens in crisis situations and for search and rescue actions:
• First, a set of best practice guidelines for LEAs, police, first responders and citizens for the use of new media, supporting tools and technologies in crisis situations
• Second, a suite of prototype software tools to enhance the ability of LEAs, police, first responders and citizens in their use of mobile and smart devices in crisis situations This project will explore how the huge popularity of new communication media, particularly web-based social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and the prolific use of high-tech mobile devices, can be harnessed to provide efficient and effective communication and enhanced situational awareness during a crisis.
The ATHENA system is a crisis communication and management system that encourages and enables the public to participate, in an ethical way, in the process of emergency communication to contribute to the security of the citizen in crisis situations and for search and rescue actions. ATHENA makes use of new social media and high tech mobile devices to efficiently and effectively acquire, analyse and disseminate crisis information and intelligence that is appropriate and useful to
LEAs/police/first responders and the public.
Project ATHENA's final 12 months has included some major milestones. The main achievements
(although not exhaustive) include;
- Completion of 30 final deliverables.
- Completion of the social media scanning/crowd sourcing tools.
- Completion of the app's features, including the crisis map and send/receive tools.
- Completion of all CCCID features.
- Completion of the ATHENA logic cloud.
- The planning, execution and evaluation of the final integrated prototype testing phase.
- Completion of the ATHENA published volume.
Project Management:
Throughout the final reporting period of the project, the management team have continued to maintain a close and productive relationship with the consortium partners ensuring that the programme of work is carried out effectively and efficiently enabling an environment where any issues, deviations or feedback can be shared and actioned at the earliest opportunity.
West Yorkshire Police have arranged and facilitated two physical consortium meetings throughout the period where partners have had the opportunity to provide the current status of each task, deliverable and work package, whilst focusing on the recommendations from the second review. One of these facilitated a public demonstration of the system to a select audience of invited guests.
West Yorkshire Police created, arranged and ran a large scale live play testing exercise utilising our public order training facilities and trained officers.
Crisis Communication Requirements and Ethics:
Throughout the last 12 months of the project, Work Package 2 has focused on completing four final deliverables for Athena:
D2.5 - is a report on best practice for post-hoc analysis and review of real cases
D2.6 - a report on best practice for post-hoc analysis and review of real cases
D2.7 - a report on best practice for user-centred approach to development of systems and services.
Human Factors and Best Practice; Crisis Sense Making and Communication:
In year 3 the final WP3 deliverable was completed: D3.5) Human factors evaluation of use cases and exercises: Human factors evaluation of use cases. [M30]. This report sets out to evaluate human factors identified in the ATHENA project use cases and exercises. It provides an overview of work package three's previous research findings identifying key human factors characteristics that are salient in crises. These key characteristics are linked to sense making, communication, critical thinking, emotional response and co-ordination. Following from this, a distinct overview of the considerations that are pertinent to emergency management processes is provided.
The exercises that have been carried out to test and validate the ATHENA solution are then evaluated from a human factors perspective. This illustrates the ways in which these considerations have been
at the core of the user-centric development of the system.
Evaluation and Validation of the live exercises:
The final 12 months of the project have resulted in the culmination of the Evaluation, Validation and Live Exercises. Included in this was the technical sign-off against functional user needs and the hosting of the final live-play exercise.
The exercise was held at West Yorkshire Police's Carr Gate Public Order Training facilities and centred on five different scenarios: an ordinary day, a public order incident that included a weapon, a bus attack in which a police officer was injured, a potential terrorist incident that included both chemical weapons and firearms, and an 'at risk' vulnerable person scenario that was run simultaneously in different geographic location. The storylines in the scenarios were designed to test the various ATHENA features with the focus being on information exchange between citizens and the Police. In total, around 100 people were involved with the exercise, all of whom fully engaged
with the proceedings so that near 'real-life' scenarios could be played out. A senior officer from West
Yorkshire Police took the role of Silver Command and made strategic decisions based on the incoming information. Other police officers, volunteers and staff took various roles, and the ATHENA consortium members helped to facilitate and engaged with sending social media messages from the ATHENA app. West Yorkshire Police public order training officers played a key role in organizing the exercise and ensured the proceedings ran smoothly and safely.
Dissemination, Exploitation and Public Awareness:
The Athena consortium have created a number of opportunities to disseminate Athena and continued to look at innovative ways to network and share information with both professionals and citizens.
To promote and communicate ATHENA's 'beyond state-of-the-art' technology and research, a collection of the project's results and findings has been assembled in a volume being published by Springer as part of the publisher's leading series of advanced sciences and technologies for security applications. This unique volume is authored by the ATHENA consortium partners. Contributors to the book include a rich mix of global contributors from across the landscape of academia, emergency response, law enforcement, government, and private industry. The production-ready manuscript has been delivered to Springer, and the electronic version will soon be available. The printed version will go on sale March 2017.
Project Results:
Work Package 4 – Social Media and Crisis Information Processing
In Athena, a number of heterogeneous, unstructured, information sources must be searched, and potentially very large quantities of relevant information acquired, federated and processed in real time. The results of this processing must be available to a number of distributed visual analytics and information dissemination components. These factors presented a number of challenges for this work package that were dealt with in the following tasks:
Task 4.1: Social media scanning/crowd sourcing
Task 4.2: Aggregation and Analysis Tools
Task 4.3: Integration with the Decentralized Intelligence Processing Framework (WP7)
Major progress was made against the WP objectives in this period with the introduction of the full CIPC data processing pipeline; social media monitoring; and the design and implementation of the sentiment analysis, credibility assessment, formal concept analysis and aggregation processes.
The CIPC data processing pipeline, now in its final form, consists of integration with the SAS IRS, SAS Sentiment Analysis Studio and SAS Content Categorisation components. On top of this, the Concept Miner functionality from the previous period has been expanded and generalised into the OSINT Store platform for managing data projects. This new capabilities enables ATHENA administrators to oversee and manage multiple data projects which currently form the "inbox" and "outbox" portions of the new data processing pipeline. The addition of this generalised component now also enables the automatic expiry of reports and social media data after a short period of time, allowing all processing components to work on a purposefully small window of "time-sensitive situational knowledge".
The introduction of social media monitoring has also been integrated into the CIPC pipeline (through modification and configuration of the SAS Twitter crawler; and the introduction of a new SAS OSINT Store plugin). On top of this, the actual Twitter monitoring process has been consciously defined to reflect the legal and ethical boundaries and considerations present in ATHENA. The administrators may configure the SAS social media crawling to monitor specific hashtags or accounts (although, really the administrators have access to the entire Twitter API). However, in ATHENA, the retrieval model is currently focussed around the monitoring of key hashtags and accounts: these are "#athenatest" and "@ProjectAthenaEU". It has been highlighted in the deliverables that these hashtags should represent important crisis- or emergency-cantered terms and accounts.
The sentiment analysis component within SAS has been enabled against the sentiment model developed in the previous reporting period; and integrated into the CIPC's data processing pipeline. The model includes sentiment scores both generally and also towards any existing "products", such as "police force", "fire brigade" etc.
Credibility assessment has been a major part of this period and has theoretically swung from complex ideas around modelling all crises to a significantly simpler approach which exploits the most basic principles of machine learning. The latter was the chosen option and much of the rationale comes from the reality that no previous crisis should be able to influence a new crisis with regards to credibility. For instance; an earthquake can happen at any time New Zealand, thus how can an earthquake that happened three weeks, or three years ago influence the credibility of one occurring today. The result of the approach is to "learn" from the decisions made by operators in the moment using a small window of knowledge and to direct the credibility of unvalidated reports based on the decisions being made by operators. Whilst this has been designed and implemented, it is still at the early prototype stage.
Further work has been carried out of the formal concept analysis portion of the CIPC pipeline and has led to the design and implementation of the actual aggregation process. Firstly, the formal concept analysis runs against all recent reports (from the ATHENA Mobile App and social media within a 3-hour window) which produces a formal concept tree which in merged with the other recently discovered "concepts". These are then collapsed into aggregated reports (events) on the basis of location, time and category.
All of the main CIPC functionality is now in place at varying levels of quality and development. The main pipeline is mature and has been operating continuously since around M26, with the steady addition of new components.
Thus, the final ATHENA prototype CIPC provides functionality beyond the state of the art in crisis management systems in several ways:
• Although existing systems utilize aggregation, this is typically based on clustering Tweets according to locality. The FCA aggregation in ATHENA aggregates all incoming data based not only on location, but also event category and automatically includes in the aggregation all other relevant extracted information common to the aggregated sources. This provides not only a solution to information overload but gives a much more focussed and detailed picture for situation awareness.
• The ATHENA CIPC uses sentiment analysis in a novel way, adapting commercial product-based software to look at sentiment in terms of fearfulness and safety rather than like/dislike. Combining such sentiment analysis with other features, such as FCA aggregation, gives crisis managers a hitherto unseen picture of the unfolding crisis situation and important information as to how resources can be best focussed on safeguarding fearful citizens.
• Although automated credibility assessment is not new in the realms of social media, the ATHENA CIPC has developed a novel and successful approach (as demonstrated in the final live exercises) whereby human expertise of the crisis management team is pivotal in the automated 'learning' process in a dynamic sense, rather than the more traditional approach of categorising a training data set. With experts making initial assessments based on the particular, currently occurring, crisis event, rather than relying on historical data, reliable assessments of new information can then be automatically provided by the CIPC.
• The development of a comprehensive 'crisis taxonomy' and associated text-mining rules gives the ATHENA system capabilities that are beyond the state of the art of current crisis management systems. Automated categorisation and aggregation based on the taxonomy assists the crisis managers greatly in quickly forming a clear picture of the unfolding crisis and the key events therein.
• Finally, the collective functionally and automated processes of the ATHENA CIPC provides a decision support system hitherto unavailable to crisis managers and their teams.
Work Package 5 – Mobile Application Development for Crisis Management
Work Package 5 (WP5) was responsible for developing a mobile application for crisis management. The mobile application will allow users of smartphones (both public and “trusted” users with roles in crisis management) to report observations, request help, and receive information during a crisis. It will also interface with the Command and Control Centre Intelligence Dashboard (CCCID – WP6)) to send user reports and data to the CCCID while receiving and displaying information from the CCCID back to the users.
Objectives;
- encourage and enable the public to participate in crisis communications that contribute to the security of citizens.
- Develop a website and application, optimized for mobile devices, that allows users of smart phones and mobile devices to report observations, opinions and offers of help/services (via text, audio and video) and receive information during a crisis.
- Utilize smart phone GPS information to enable faster and more directed activities by first responders, especially for search and rescue, including sending instructions to smart phones in specific locations/areas, e.g. “get out of...” or “stay away from...”
- Enhance the public’s situational awareness by making crowd-sourced information (e.g. the crisis map, alerts, and headlines) available to the public.
- Provide a new means of communication for search and rescue that enables emergency messaging when land lines and cell communications are disabled.
These factors presented a number of challenges for this work package that were dealt with in the following tasks:
Task 5.1: Crisis Map
This task will create a crisis map tool that uses crowd-sourced crisis information, combined with geo-spatial and temporal information, to display event reports, automated summaries, danger zones, safe routes, public sentiment, crisis progress, location of “ATHENA Life Support System” distress signals for search and rescue, and “ATHENA Citizen Reporter System”.
Task 5.2: “ATHENA Citizen Reporter System” Feed
This task will provide citizen observers with a ‘point and shoot’ system to record or stream photo, audio and video and transmit the stream/recording to the information processing centre for inclusion in the crisis map.
Task 5.3: “ATHENA Life Support System” for Search and Rescue
This task will provide a ‘life-support’ system of emergency messaging that works even when traditional forms of communication are disabled.
Task 5.4: Mobile Information send Tools
This task will create mobile information send tools whereby citizens are able to report observations, judgements, opinions, sentiment, cries for help (for search and rescue) and offers of help via a text and alert system utilizing a crisis-focused taxonomy.
Task 5.5: Mobile Information Receive Tools
This task will create mobile information receive tools. A scrolling live headline banner and an alert messaging system will allow the LEA/police/first responders to communicate essential information to citizens. GPS information will be used to enable more effective and efficient activities by first responders, e.g. for search and rescue, and to transmit instructions to the smart phones of citizens in specific locations/areas
The work package
In Year 3 of the Project, WP5 accomplished building the fully integrated prototype of the mobile app. This version of the app contains featured outlined in the Feature Requirements and fully communicates with the CCCID for those features as necessary. Such features include but are not limited to:
• Providing a map view and list view of relevant information, which can be filtered and searched. Highlighting key information to stand out.
• Users submitting a report with media attachment (photo, video, audio), seeing their own reports and whether it has been read by authorities or not.
• Sending Help Request with or without cellular connection, with auto-populated information such as user-saved information and geolocation (with consent).
• Storing user-specific emergency information such as important locations and emergency contact information (with consent)
• Communicating user location using GPS (with consent)
• Supporting citizen users in sending and receiving information about crises
• Supported “trusted” users of various clearance levels with features like direct messaging and advanced filtering
• Visualization of danger zones, and the ability to send geo-targeted messages to users in the danger zone
• Beyond state of the art proof-of-concept mesh communication between users
• Web browser user interface for non smartphone users
• Beyond state of the art consent forms, clearly communicating privacy implications in text and visuals
While above features may exist individually in other apps, to the consortium’s knowledge there is no emergency response mobile application with such extensive support for both public and trusted users and the interlinking of the two groups. This integration of above features into a single app is beyond the state of the art.
Year 3 of the project also included extensive user testing both static and live, for optimal user experience, and iterative development to reflect user feedback. All deliverables within WP5 are successfully completed and submitted, and there is no corrective action required for WP5.
Work Package 6 – Command and Control Centre Intelligence Dashboard
Work Package 6 was responsible for developing a Command and Control Centre Intelligence Dashboard to be used by first responders in the event of a crisis. The main objectives were as follows;
- To supply Command and Control with actionable information concerning the unfolding crisis using an intelligence dashboard version of the crisis map visualisations, including “ATHENA Citizen Reporter System”.
- To provide crisis summary information and an ability to query crisis information.
- To provide direct communications with tactical first responders and the public (particularly for search and rescue actions).
- To provide a content management system to maintain and monitor the dedicated crisis social media entities, crisis headlines and crisis alerts.
The WP addressed these requirements via the following tasks;
Task 6.1: CCCID requirements analysis and architecture
Task 6.2: Crisis Map
Task 6.3: Social Media Content Management Tool
Task 6.4: Mobile Communication Centre
Task 6.5: Crisis Summary Query Tool
Progress on WP6 has been towards to final state of the dashboard capabilities and over this period has included the development and refinement of: improved overall layout and look and feel; list views of important locations, events (aggregated reports) and sensors; search and filter capabilities; timeline visualisation; zones; GDACS; and social media and event pins.
The overall look and feel of the ATHENA CCCID has been hugely improved. The lists are now laid out in a much more effective and pleasing manner; modal creation pages have been added; important location pins can be created in multiple locations; the search and filtering has been improved drastically into the top navigation bar. Many administrative functions have also been added which include the management of integrations between the Mobile App back-end, CIPC and GDACS server. Additional layers have also been added to the map including: streets, terrain and satellite among others.
Lists have been added in a tabbed manner to represent the important locations; but also the newly added zones; events and sensors. These lists are all dynamically updated and respond to the selected time period filters. There is now also a way of choosing to show reports only, events (aggregated reports) only or both of these.
The new search and filter capabilities exploit the screen real estate at the top of the dashboard in order to show clearly the currently selected filters and the current search terms. These can be added and removed on demand one by one. They also search in an appropriate manner now too. For example, multiple categories are queries using a disjunction; whereas different field types are queries using a conjunction.
A new visualisation page has been added which shows the timeline of the selected period time of the statistical data that is being collected. This statistical data is also collected in an efficient and performant manner which ensures that viewing such statistics does not required expensive queries against the database, allowing a dynamic real-time view of what is going through the system. The included visualisations are all over time (the time period selected) and show all incoming reports; all reports for a given location (or it's hierarchical parents: region, country); all reports for the time period per category. The last of these uses a colour-coded line graph with a key to show all categories.
The ability to create and manage zones (danger zones, safe zones, ...) has been added to the CCCID. These can be created using a simple draw then edit interface where the user can draw a rough outline and then this is converted into an adjustable polygon. The user then adds metadata to the zone (including the colour via the category - of 5/6 categories). These are then made available to the ATHENA Mobile App.
The dashboard has been integrated with the Global Disaster Alert Coordination System (GDACS) which draws from data on global disasters (or potential disasters) including earthquakes, floods and tropical storms. This data is them placed into the CCCID via the new sensors API which was added to enable external data providers to integrate with the dashboard easily. This has been used in the UK exercise to simulate the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system.
Social media entities have been added as types of report, so when the CIPC discovers social media posts from Twitter within the accounts and hashtags it is monitored (or how else it has been configured) these social media posts become reports in the CCCID. They are represented with a different colour background on the map pins and list view and provide information and links to the source information.
Events (aggregated reports) are also now represented in the CCCID and accessible from either the list view (under the events tab) and on the CCCID map. These events are currently implemented in a relatively crude manner due to their prototypical nature however the idea is that they would be able to provide all the same functionality as a report within the CCCID, but in modifying them, their child reports would also be updated. For example, if an event were to be validated, all of the aggregated reports below it would also be validated.
Thus, the final prototype ATHENA CCCID realises a number of significant advances in crisis management systems, beyond the state of the art in existing systems:
• The two-way communication provided by the CCCID (combined with the mobile app, of course) is a substantial step forward compared to existing approaches based on interaction in social media or communication via traditional news and information channels. The process of automatically pulling information from the crisis environment and then pushing only validated information back to the public provides a faster, more reliable, more clearly prioritised and more focused means of crisis communication than hitherto possible.
• By sourcing information from not only social media and the internet, but also a dedicated crisis reporting mobile app, and also from domain experts (via the ATHENA logic cloud) and from other available useful information sources (such as GDACS), the ATHENA CCCID provides crisis managers information from a wider range of useful sources than hitherto possible. And by automated processes of categorisation, filtering and aggregation, even with a potentially huge amount of incoming data from a wide range of sources, a single, homogenised view is provided, successfully dealing with the problems of information overload and the ability to quickly gain clear situational awareness.
• Although there are existing situational awareness systems for crisis managers, arguably, the ATHENA CCCID provides the most comprehensive set of visualisations and tools to aid in the decision making and commination processes. Through a user and citizen focussed design and development process, involving several prototype stages, a thorough review of existing systems, and a number of carefully designed, co-ordinated and evaluated live exercises, the resulting final prototype of the ATHENA CCCID stands as a potential exemplar of such systems, portraying a collection of key features and functionality hitherto unavailable to crisis managers and their teams.
Work Package 7 - Integration and the ATHENA Cloud
The objectives of this WP were:
• Development of a framework that supports federation between various information sources and analysis services.
• Introduction of mechanisms that support creation of secure information flows between information sources and processing services in collaborative situation assessment systems.
• Development of interfaces to various components extracting information from social media and mobile devices and from various crisis stakeholders; LEAs/police/first responders and the public.
During the final 12 month period of the project all 5 of the WP7 deliverables have been submitted in their final status, including the description of planned resilience against distributed denial of service attached as recommended in the first EC review.
Progress towards objectives:
• Finalized development of the Athena Logic Cloud (ALC) software based on the Dynamic Process Integration Framework (DPIF)
Beyond state of the art: Up to this date there is no comparable open-ended information management and interoperability platform that supports easy integration of existing processes (algorithms) or human experts (social-technical systems).
• Finalized development and integration of the secure layer Martello in the Athena Logic Cloud.
• Finalized integration of the ALC with de CCCID and Mobile App through Epidemico’s web service interface.
• Finalized integration of the person/vehicle tracker component (WP4) with the ALC.
Beyond state of the art: The Athena tracking component with sparse observations goes beyond state of the art. State of the art tracking solutions use regular frequent observations which is suitable for most conventional applications. The applications that we focus on in Athena only provide sparse and infrequent observations making state of the art solutions unusable. The combination of the ALC with the tracker component, where the ALC is used to retrieve observations, either from human observers or sensors, is unique.
Deviations
• The planned integration effort with the CCCID was smaller than planned, because integration with the CCCID could indirectly be done via the Epidemico’s web service interface.
Potential Impact:
Implementation of the ATHENA solution and guidelines will have an immediate direct and indirect societal impact. Directly, ATHENA shall significantly change the expectations of the ordinary citizen on first responders. With the streamlining and integration of communication, there shall be a greater expectation of professionalism, responsibility and accountability. Indirectly, the implementation of ATHENA may lead to greater parity between communities in terms of response.
With better communication and increased integration, previously underserved communities are more likely to see improved services and emphases upon their security and safety.
Impact on First Responders:
The program will influence first responders in three key ways including research, practice and training as follows;
i) RESEARCH opportunities will come from both social science and quantitative metrics, where response time improvements can be measurable;
ii) PRACTICE of the integration and connectivity that shall occur between first responder agencies shall build upon current bridges that exist. A natural outcome shall be a greater understanding and appreciation of role differentiation;
iii) TRAINING impacts shall be significant, with the demonstrated need for professional
collaboration and enhanced interoperability in communication pre-crisis, during crisis and post-crisis. Because of the record produced through these communications during crisis, there will be greatly improved ability to analyse and assess after-action response thereby ensuring that lessons for continued development s are captured by first responder agencies to better protect the safety and security of the ordinary citizen in future crisis.
Technical and Scientific Impacts:
- Crowd Mapping: The ATHENA platform will have the ability to crowd source using data from multiple social media channels. Crowd sourcing allows tasks typically performed by 'employees' now to be performed by a collection of individuals within a crowd who have no particular connection outside of the ability to perform the desired function. The response concepts that will be developed
by ATHENA will generate information and make it accessible to decision makers and emergency responders in a timelier manner and ultimately may contribute to the resolution of an incident in a quicker and more efficient manner. The
ATHENA platform will allow emergency managers to utilise public gatherings and generated information strategically.
- GIS: The ATHENA Geographic information system is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyse, manage, and present all types of geographically referenced data. The impact of the ATHENA GIS will be the ability to view large sets of data in three dimensions from multiple viewpoints. It will open up new horizons in terms of applicability with the capability to query a surface, and create a realistic perspective image that drapes raster and vector data over a surface / area.
- Intelligence Dashboard: The intelligence dashboard is a real time data visualisation tool that will consolidate intelligence information from multiple sources onto a highly customisable platform. The added value will be that it will indicate the status at a specific point in time Network management, endpoint security, remote backup will all form part of the application.
- Visual Analytics: The strategic impact of the ATHENA project will be its visual analytics and the ability to demonstrate how social media data can be used strategically. It will provide a platform for emergency managers to view unfiltered messages, which is critical to aid decision making. Providing
a state of the art solution application to meet the growing needs of practitioners and their teams.
The public are under-utilized crisis responders; they are often first on the scene, vastly outnumber the emergency first responders and are creative and resourceful. In a crisis, the public self-organise into voluntary groups, adapt quickly to changing circumstances, emerge as leaders and experts and
perform countless life-saving actions; and they are increasingly reliant upon the use of new communications media to do it. ATHENA will help them by joining their conversations and adding an enabling voice. ATHENA will give them the information they ask for, in a way they can understand. ATHENA will assist them in targeting their actions, by directing them to the places they need to be
and away from danger. ATHENA will identify emergent behaviour that is beneficial and provide support with agency resources to develop that behaviour. The public have an extraordinary ability to adapt in a crisis, because it can mean the difference between life and death. ATHENA will help the
public help themselves by empowering them with their own collective intelligence and the means by which they can exploit that intelligence. ATHENA will provide the emergency services with new realtime
intelligence from crowd-sourced information, greatly assisting in their decision-making processes and making search and rescue more efficient. ATHENA will create a fundamental and permanent shift in the way crisis situations are managed; helping the public as victim to turn into the public as part of the crisis team. ATHENA will utilise social media and smart mobile devices as part of a shared and interoperable two-way communication platform. By developing an orchestrated cycle of data, information and knowledge, ATHENA will empower both the public and emergency services with the intelligence they need in dealing with a crisis.
ATHENA will move forward the state of art in two broad areas:
- Social Media and Crisis Communication: The use of social media in crises by LEAs, police, first responders, and the public
- Technologically exploiting social media in crisis management: The, searching, acquisition, aggregation, filtering and presentation of knowledge from social media to support crisis management using smart and mobile devices, development of guidelines and best practices for proactive public / LEA collaborative emergency and crisis management engagement
Project Context and Objectives:
The ATHENA project brings together major user communities with world leading experts in crisis management and experts and technology developers of mobile and social media use and development. The goal of the ATHENA project is to deliver two major outputs that will enable and encourage users of new media to contribute to the security of citizens in crisis situations and for search and rescue actions:
• First, a set of best practice guidelines for LEAs, police, first responders and citizens for the use of new media, supporting tools and technologies in crisis situations
• Second, a suite of prototype software tools to enhance the ability of LEAs, police, first responders and citizens in their use of mobile and smart devices in crisis situations This project will explore how the huge popularity of new communication media, particularly web-based social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and the prolific use of high-tech mobile devices, can be harnessed to provide efficient and effective communication and enhanced situational awareness during a crisis.
The ATHENA system is a crisis communication and management system that encourages and enables the public to participate, in an ethical way, in the process of emergency communication to contribute to the security of the citizen in crisis situations and for search and rescue actions. ATHENA makes use of new social media and high tech mobile devices to efficiently and effectively acquire, analyse and disseminate crisis information and intelligence that is appropriate and useful to
LEAs/police/first responders and the public.
Project ATHENA's final 12 months has included some major milestones. The main achievements
(although not exhaustive) include;
- Completion of 30 final deliverables.
- Completion of the social media scanning/crowd sourcing tools.
- Completion of the app's features, including the crisis map and send/receive tools.
- Completion of all CCCID features.
- Completion of the ATHENA logic cloud.
- The planning, execution and evaluation of the final integrated prototype testing phase.
- Completion of the ATHENA published volume.
Project Management:
Throughout the final reporting period of the project, the management team have continued to maintain a close and productive relationship with the consortium partners ensuring that the programme of work is carried out effectively and efficiently enabling an environment where any issues, deviations or feedback can be shared and actioned at the earliest opportunity.
West Yorkshire Police have arranged and facilitated two physical consortium meetings throughout the period where partners have had the opportunity to provide the current status of each task, deliverable and work package, whilst focusing on the recommendations from the second review. One of these facilitated a public demonstration of the system to a select audience of invited guests.
West Yorkshire Police created, arranged and ran a large scale live play testing exercise utilising our public order training facilities and trained officers.
Crisis Communication Requirements and Ethics:
Throughout the last 12 months of the project, Work Package 2 has focused on completing four final deliverables for Athena:
D2.5 - is a report on best practice for post-hoc analysis and review of real cases
D2.6 - a report on best practice for post-hoc analysis and review of real cases
D2.7 - a report on best practice for user-centred approach to development of systems and services.
Human Factors and Best Practice; Crisis Sense Making and Communication:
In year 3 the final WP3 deliverable was completed: D3.5) Human factors evaluation of use cases and exercises: Human factors evaluation of use cases. [M30]. This report sets out to evaluate human factors identified in the ATHENA project use cases and exercises. It provides an overview of work package three's previous research findings identifying key human factors characteristics that are salient in crises. These key characteristics are linked to sense making, communication, critical thinking, emotional response and co-ordination. Following from this, a distinct overview of the considerations that are pertinent to emergency management processes is provided.
The exercises that have been carried out to test and validate the ATHENA solution are then evaluated from a human factors perspective. This illustrates the ways in which these considerations have been
at the core of the user-centric development of the system.
Evaluation and Validation of the live exercises:
The final 12 months of the project have resulted in the culmination of the Evaluation, Validation and Live Exercises. Included in this was the technical sign-off against functional user needs and the hosting of the final live-play exercise.
The exercise was held at West Yorkshire Police's Carr Gate Public Order Training facilities and centred on five different scenarios: an ordinary day, a public order incident that included a weapon, a bus attack in which a police officer was injured, a potential terrorist incident that included both chemical weapons and firearms, and an 'at risk' vulnerable person scenario that was run simultaneously in different geographic location. The storylines in the scenarios were designed to test the various ATHENA features with the focus being on information exchange between citizens and the Police. In total, around 100 people were involved with the exercise, all of whom fully engaged
with the proceedings so that near 'real-life' scenarios could be played out. A senior officer from West
Yorkshire Police took the role of Silver Command and made strategic decisions based on the incoming information. Other police officers, volunteers and staff took various roles, and the ATHENA consortium members helped to facilitate and engaged with sending social media messages from the ATHENA app. West Yorkshire Police public order training officers played a key role in organizing the exercise and ensured the proceedings ran smoothly and safely.
Dissemination, Exploitation and Public Awareness:
The Athena consortium have created a number of opportunities to disseminate Athena and continued to look at innovative ways to network and share information with both professionals and citizens.
To promote and communicate ATHENA's 'beyond state-of-the-art' technology and research, a collection of the project's results and findings has been assembled in a volume being published by Springer as part of the publisher's leading series of advanced sciences and technologies for security applications. This unique volume is authored by the ATHENA consortium partners. Contributors to the book include a rich mix of global contributors from across the landscape of academia, emergency response, law enforcement, government, and private industry. The production-ready manuscript has been delivered to Springer, and the electronic version will soon be available. The printed version will go on sale March 2017.
Project Results:
Work Package 4 – Social Media and Crisis Information Processing
In Athena, a number of heterogeneous, unstructured, information sources must be searched, and potentially very large quantities of relevant information acquired, federated and processed in real time. The results of this processing must be available to a number of distributed visual analytics and information dissemination components. These factors presented a number of challenges for this work package that were dealt with in the following tasks:
Task 4.1: Social media scanning/crowd sourcing
Task 4.2: Aggregation and Analysis Tools
Task 4.3: Integration with the Decentralized Intelligence Processing Framework (WP7)
Major progress was made against the WP objectives in this period with the introduction of the full CIPC data processing pipeline; social media monitoring; and the design and implementation of the sentiment analysis, credibility assessment, formal concept analysis and aggregation processes.
The CIPC data processing pipeline, now in its final form, consists of integration with the SAS IRS, SAS Sentiment Analysis Studio and SAS Content Categorisation components. On top of this, the Concept Miner functionality from the previous period has been expanded and generalised into the OSINT Store platform for managing data projects. This new capabilities enables ATHENA administrators to oversee and manage multiple data projects which currently form the "inbox" and "outbox" portions of the new data processing pipeline. The addition of this generalised component now also enables the automatic expiry of reports and social media data after a short period of time, allowing all processing components to work on a purposefully small window of "time-sensitive situational knowledge".
The introduction of social media monitoring has also been integrated into the CIPC pipeline (through modification and configuration of the SAS Twitter crawler; and the introduction of a new SAS OSINT Store plugin). On top of this, the actual Twitter monitoring process has been consciously defined to reflect the legal and ethical boundaries and considerations present in ATHENA. The administrators may configure the SAS social media crawling to monitor specific hashtags or accounts (although, really the administrators have access to the entire Twitter API). However, in ATHENA, the retrieval model is currently focussed around the monitoring of key hashtags and accounts: these are "#athenatest" and "@ProjectAthenaEU". It has been highlighted in the deliverables that these hashtags should represent important crisis- or emergency-cantered terms and accounts.
The sentiment analysis component within SAS has been enabled against the sentiment model developed in the previous reporting period; and integrated into the CIPC's data processing pipeline. The model includes sentiment scores both generally and also towards any existing "products", such as "police force", "fire brigade" etc.
Credibility assessment has been a major part of this period and has theoretically swung from complex ideas around modelling all crises to a significantly simpler approach which exploits the most basic principles of machine learning. The latter was the chosen option and much of the rationale comes from the reality that no previous crisis should be able to influence a new crisis with regards to credibility. For instance; an earthquake can happen at any time New Zealand, thus how can an earthquake that happened three weeks, or three years ago influence the credibility of one occurring today. The result of the approach is to "learn" from the decisions made by operators in the moment using a small window of knowledge and to direct the credibility of unvalidated reports based on the decisions being made by operators. Whilst this has been designed and implemented, it is still at the early prototype stage.
Further work has been carried out of the formal concept analysis portion of the CIPC pipeline and has led to the design and implementation of the actual aggregation process. Firstly, the formal concept analysis runs against all recent reports (from the ATHENA Mobile App and social media within a 3-hour window) which produces a formal concept tree which in merged with the other recently discovered "concepts". These are then collapsed into aggregated reports (events) on the basis of location, time and category.
All of the main CIPC functionality is now in place at varying levels of quality and development. The main pipeline is mature and has been operating continuously since around M26, with the steady addition of new components.
Thus, the final ATHENA prototype CIPC provides functionality beyond the state of the art in crisis management systems in several ways:
• Although existing systems utilize aggregation, this is typically based on clustering Tweets according to locality. The FCA aggregation in ATHENA aggregates all incoming data based not only on location, but also event category and automatically includes in the aggregation all other relevant extracted information common to the aggregated sources. This provides not only a solution to information overload but gives a much more focussed and detailed picture for situation awareness.
• The ATHENA CIPC uses sentiment analysis in a novel way, adapting commercial product-based software to look at sentiment in terms of fearfulness and safety rather than like/dislike. Combining such sentiment analysis with other features, such as FCA aggregation, gives crisis managers a hitherto unseen picture of the unfolding crisis situation and important information as to how resources can be best focussed on safeguarding fearful citizens.
• Although automated credibility assessment is not new in the realms of social media, the ATHENA CIPC has developed a novel and successful approach (as demonstrated in the final live exercises) whereby human expertise of the crisis management team is pivotal in the automated 'learning' process in a dynamic sense, rather than the more traditional approach of categorising a training data set. With experts making initial assessments based on the particular, currently occurring, crisis event, rather than relying on historical data, reliable assessments of new information can then be automatically provided by the CIPC.
• The development of a comprehensive 'crisis taxonomy' and associated text-mining rules gives the ATHENA system capabilities that are beyond the state of the art of current crisis management systems. Automated categorisation and aggregation based on the taxonomy assists the crisis managers greatly in quickly forming a clear picture of the unfolding crisis and the key events therein.
• Finally, the collective functionally and automated processes of the ATHENA CIPC provides a decision support system hitherto unavailable to crisis managers and their teams.
Work Package 5 – Mobile Application Development for Crisis Management
Work Package 5 (WP5) was responsible for developing a mobile application for crisis management. The mobile application will allow users of smartphones (both public and “trusted” users with roles in crisis management) to report observations, request help, and receive information during a crisis. It will also interface with the Command and Control Centre Intelligence Dashboard (CCCID – WP6)) to send user reports and data to the CCCID while receiving and displaying information from the CCCID back to the users.
Objectives;
- encourage and enable the public to participate in crisis communications that contribute to the security of citizens.
- Develop a website and application, optimized for mobile devices, that allows users of smart phones and mobile devices to report observations, opinions and offers of help/services (via text, audio and video) and receive information during a crisis.
- Utilize smart phone GPS information to enable faster and more directed activities by first responders, especially for search and rescue, including sending instructions to smart phones in specific locations/areas, e.g. “get out of...” or “stay away from...”
- Enhance the public’s situational awareness by making crowd-sourced information (e.g. the crisis map, alerts, and headlines) available to the public.
- Provide a new means of communication for search and rescue that enables emergency messaging when land lines and cell communications are disabled.
These factors presented a number of challenges for this work package that were dealt with in the following tasks:
Task 5.1: Crisis Map
This task will create a crisis map tool that uses crowd-sourced crisis information, combined with geo-spatial and temporal information, to display event reports, automated summaries, danger zones, safe routes, public sentiment, crisis progress, location of “ATHENA Life Support System” distress signals for search and rescue, and “ATHENA Citizen Reporter System”.
Task 5.2: “ATHENA Citizen Reporter System” Feed
This task will provide citizen observers with a ‘point and shoot’ system to record or stream photo, audio and video and transmit the stream/recording to the information processing centre for inclusion in the crisis map.
Task 5.3: “ATHENA Life Support System” for Search and Rescue
This task will provide a ‘life-support’ system of emergency messaging that works even when traditional forms of communication are disabled.
Task 5.4: Mobile Information send Tools
This task will create mobile information send tools whereby citizens are able to report observations, judgements, opinions, sentiment, cries for help (for search and rescue) and offers of help via a text and alert system utilizing a crisis-focused taxonomy.
Task 5.5: Mobile Information Receive Tools
This task will create mobile information receive tools. A scrolling live headline banner and an alert messaging system will allow the LEA/police/first responders to communicate essential information to citizens. GPS information will be used to enable more effective and efficient activities by first responders, e.g. for search and rescue, and to transmit instructions to the smart phones of citizens in specific locations/areas
The work package
In Year 3 of the Project, WP5 accomplished building the fully integrated prototype of the mobile app. This version of the app contains featured outlined in the Feature Requirements and fully communicates with the CCCID for those features as necessary. Such features include but are not limited to:
• Providing a map view and list view of relevant information, which can be filtered and searched. Highlighting key information to stand out.
• Users submitting a report with media attachment (photo, video, audio), seeing their own reports and whether it has been read by authorities or not.
• Sending Help Request with or without cellular connection, with auto-populated information such as user-saved information and geolocation (with consent).
• Storing user-specific emergency information such as important locations and emergency contact information (with consent)
• Communicating user location using GPS (with consent)
• Supporting citizen users in sending and receiving information about crises
• Supported “trusted” users of various clearance levels with features like direct messaging and advanced filtering
• Visualization of danger zones, and the ability to send geo-targeted messages to users in the danger zone
• Beyond state of the art proof-of-concept mesh communication between users
• Web browser user interface for non smartphone users
• Beyond state of the art consent forms, clearly communicating privacy implications in text and visuals
While above features may exist individually in other apps, to the consortium’s knowledge there is no emergency response mobile application with such extensive support for both public and trusted users and the interlinking of the two groups. This integration of above features into a single app is beyond the state of the art.
Year 3 of the project also included extensive user testing both static and live, for optimal user experience, and iterative development to reflect user feedback. All deliverables within WP5 are successfully completed and submitted, and there is no corrective action required for WP5.
Work Package 6 – Command and Control Centre Intelligence Dashboard
Work Package 6 was responsible for developing a Command and Control Centre Intelligence Dashboard to be used by first responders in the event of a crisis. The main objectives were as follows;
- To supply Command and Control with actionable information concerning the unfolding crisis using an intelligence dashboard version of the crisis map visualisations, including “ATHENA Citizen Reporter System”.
- To provide crisis summary information and an ability to query crisis information.
- To provide direct communications with tactical first responders and the public (particularly for search and rescue actions).
- To provide a content management system to maintain and monitor the dedicated crisis social media entities, crisis headlines and crisis alerts.
The WP addressed these requirements via the following tasks;
Task 6.1: CCCID requirements analysis and architecture
Task 6.2: Crisis Map
Task 6.3: Social Media Content Management Tool
Task 6.4: Mobile Communication Centre
Task 6.5: Crisis Summary Query Tool
Progress on WP6 has been towards to final state of the dashboard capabilities and over this period has included the development and refinement of: improved overall layout and look and feel; list views of important locations, events (aggregated reports) and sensors; search and filter capabilities; timeline visualisation; zones; GDACS; and social media and event pins.
The overall look and feel of the ATHENA CCCID has been hugely improved. The lists are now laid out in a much more effective and pleasing manner; modal creation pages have been added; important location pins can be created in multiple locations; the search and filtering has been improved drastically into the top navigation bar. Many administrative functions have also been added which include the management of integrations between the Mobile App back-end, CIPC and GDACS server. Additional layers have also been added to the map including: streets, terrain and satellite among others.
Lists have been added in a tabbed manner to represent the important locations; but also the newly added zones; events and sensors. These lists are all dynamically updated and respond to the selected time period filters. There is now also a way of choosing to show reports only, events (aggregated reports) only or both of these.
The new search and filter capabilities exploit the screen real estate at the top of the dashboard in order to show clearly the currently selected filters and the current search terms. These can be added and removed on demand one by one. They also search in an appropriate manner now too. For example, multiple categories are queries using a disjunction; whereas different field types are queries using a conjunction.
A new visualisation page has been added which shows the timeline of the selected period time of the statistical data that is being collected. This statistical data is also collected in an efficient and performant manner which ensures that viewing such statistics does not required expensive queries against the database, allowing a dynamic real-time view of what is going through the system. The included visualisations are all over time (the time period selected) and show all incoming reports; all reports for a given location (or it's hierarchical parents: region, country); all reports for the time period per category. The last of these uses a colour-coded line graph with a key to show all categories.
The ability to create and manage zones (danger zones, safe zones, ...) has been added to the CCCID. These can be created using a simple draw then edit interface where the user can draw a rough outline and then this is converted into an adjustable polygon. The user then adds metadata to the zone (including the colour via the category - of 5/6 categories). These are then made available to the ATHENA Mobile App.
The dashboard has been integrated with the Global Disaster Alert Coordination System (GDACS) which draws from data on global disasters (or potential disasters) including earthquakes, floods and tropical storms. This data is them placed into the CCCID via the new sensors API which was added to enable external data providers to integrate with the dashboard easily. This has been used in the UK exercise to simulate the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system.
Social media entities have been added as types of report, so when the CIPC discovers social media posts from Twitter within the accounts and hashtags it is monitored (or how else it has been configured) these social media posts become reports in the CCCID. They are represented with a different colour background on the map pins and list view and provide information and links to the source information.
Events (aggregated reports) are also now represented in the CCCID and accessible from either the list view (under the events tab) and on the CCCID map. These events are currently implemented in a relatively crude manner due to their prototypical nature however the idea is that they would be able to provide all the same functionality as a report within the CCCID, but in modifying them, their child reports would also be updated. For example, if an event were to be validated, all of the aggregated reports below it would also be validated.
Thus, the final prototype ATHENA CCCID realises a number of significant advances in crisis management systems, beyond the state of the art in existing systems:
• The two-way communication provided by the CCCID (combined with the mobile app, of course) is a substantial step forward compared to existing approaches based on interaction in social media or communication via traditional news and information channels. The process of automatically pulling information from the crisis environment and then pushing only validated information back to the public provides a faster, more reliable, more clearly prioritised and more focused means of crisis communication than hitherto possible.
• By sourcing information from not only social media and the internet, but also a dedicated crisis reporting mobile app, and also from domain experts (via the ATHENA logic cloud) and from other available useful information sources (such as GDACS), the ATHENA CCCID provides crisis managers information from a wider range of useful sources than hitherto possible. And by automated processes of categorisation, filtering and aggregation, even with a potentially huge amount of incoming data from a wide range of sources, a single, homogenised view is provided, successfully dealing with the problems of information overload and the ability to quickly gain clear situational awareness.
• Although there are existing situational awareness systems for crisis managers, arguably, the ATHENA CCCID provides the most comprehensive set of visualisations and tools to aid in the decision making and commination processes. Through a user and citizen focussed design and development process, involving several prototype stages, a thorough review of existing systems, and a number of carefully designed, co-ordinated and evaluated live exercises, the resulting final prototype of the ATHENA CCCID stands as a potential exemplar of such systems, portraying a collection of key features and functionality hitherto unavailable to crisis managers and their teams.
Work Package 7 - Integration and the ATHENA Cloud
The objectives of this WP were:
• Development of a framework that supports federation between various information sources and analysis services.
• Introduction of mechanisms that support creation of secure information flows between information sources and processing services in collaborative situation assessment systems.
• Development of interfaces to various components extracting information from social media and mobile devices and from various crisis stakeholders; LEAs/police/first responders and the public.
During the final 12 month period of the project all 5 of the WP7 deliverables have been submitted in their final status, including the description of planned resilience against distributed denial of service attached as recommended in the first EC review.
Progress towards objectives:
• Finalized development of the Athena Logic Cloud (ALC) software based on the Dynamic Process Integration Framework (DPIF)
Beyond state of the art: Up to this date there is no comparable open-ended information management and interoperability platform that supports easy integration of existing processes (algorithms) or human experts (social-technical systems).
• Finalized development and integration of the secure layer Martello in the Athena Logic Cloud.
• Finalized integration of the ALC with de CCCID and Mobile App through Epidemico’s web service interface.
• Finalized integration of the person/vehicle tracker component (WP4) with the ALC.
Beyond state of the art: The Athena tracking component with sparse observations goes beyond state of the art. State of the art tracking solutions use regular frequent observations which is suitable for most conventional applications. The applications that we focus on in Athena only provide sparse and infrequent observations making state of the art solutions unusable. The combination of the ALC with the tracker component, where the ALC is used to retrieve observations, either from human observers or sensors, is unique.
Deviations
• The planned integration effort with the CCCID was smaller than planned, because integration with the CCCID could indirectly be done via the Epidemico’s web service interface.
Potential Impact:
Implementation of the ATHENA solution and guidelines will have an immediate direct and indirect societal impact. Directly, ATHENA shall significantly change the expectations of the ordinary citizen on first responders. With the streamlining and integration of communication, there shall be a greater expectation of professionalism, responsibility and accountability. Indirectly, the implementation of ATHENA may lead to greater parity between communities in terms of response.
With better communication and increased integration, previously underserved communities are more likely to see improved services and emphases upon their security and safety.
Impact on First Responders:
The program will influence first responders in three key ways including research, practice and training as follows;
i) RESEARCH opportunities will come from both social science and quantitative metrics, where response time improvements can be measurable;
ii) PRACTICE of the integration and connectivity that shall occur between first responder agencies shall build upon current bridges that exist. A natural outcome shall be a greater understanding and appreciation of role differentiation;
iii) TRAINING impacts shall be significant, with the demonstrated need for professional
collaboration and enhanced interoperability in communication pre-crisis, during crisis and post-crisis. Because of the record produced through these communications during crisis, there will be greatly improved ability to analyse and assess after-action response thereby ensuring that lessons for continued development s are captured by first responder agencies to better protect the safety and security of the ordinary citizen in future crisis.
Technical and Scientific Impacts:
- Crowd Mapping: The ATHENA platform will have the ability to crowd source using data from multiple social media channels. Crowd sourcing allows tasks typically performed by 'employees' now to be performed by a collection of individuals within a crowd who have no particular connection outside of the ability to perform the desired function. The response concepts that will be developed
by ATHENA will generate information and make it accessible to decision makers and emergency responders in a timelier manner and ultimately may contribute to the resolution of an incident in a quicker and more efficient manner. The
ATHENA platform will allow emergency managers to utilise public gatherings and generated information strategically.
- GIS: The ATHENA Geographic information system is a system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyse, manage, and present all types of geographically referenced data. The impact of the ATHENA GIS will be the ability to view large sets of data in three dimensions from multiple viewpoints. It will open up new horizons in terms of applicability with the capability to query a surface, and create a realistic perspective image that drapes raster and vector data over a surface / area.
- Intelligence Dashboard: The intelligence dashboard is a real time data visualisation tool that will consolidate intelligence information from multiple sources onto a highly customisable platform. The added value will be that it will indicate the status at a specific point in time Network management, endpoint security, remote backup will all form part of the application.
- Visual Analytics: The strategic impact of the ATHENA project will be its visual analytics and the ability to demonstrate how social media data can be used strategically. It will provide a platform for emergency managers to view unfiltered messages, which is critical to aid decision making. Providing
a state of the art solution application to meet the growing needs of practitioners and their teams.