Publications related to Emergency management

Gas Sensing with Rotary-Wing Nano Aerial Vehicles

Harmful chemical compounds are released daily in warehouses, chemical plants and during environmental emergencies. Their uncontrolled dispersion contributes to the pollution of the atmosphere and threatens human and animal lives. When gas leaks occur, the ...

EPFL2024

Practical issues with modeling extreme Brazilian rainfall

Anthony Christopher Davison, Isolde Santos Previdelli, Paulo Vitor Da Costa Pereira

Accurately quantifying extreme rainfall is important for the design of hydraulic structures, for flood mapping and zoning and for disaster management. In order to produce maps of estimates of 25-year rainfall return levels in Brazil, we selected 893 shorte ...

BRAZILIAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION2021

A portable picocell antenna for 5G

Danelys Rodríguez Avila

Deployable emergency communication systems are a backbone solution for replacing damaged network infrastructures and/or providing high-end services in case of an emergency event. It is important that such systems are up-to-date with the latest mobile netwo ...

EPFL2021

The challenges of impact evaluation: Attempting to measure the effectiveness of community-based disaster risk management

Anthony Christopher Davison, Nicola Mary Banwell, Silvia Hostettler, Alfredo Rafael Kägi Trejo

Although disaster risk management is becoming increasingly important in development cooperation, there is still a lack of robust evidence regarding its effectiveness. Few studies based on a counterfactual have been conducted in the fields of disaster manag ...

2020

Spread and dynamics of the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy: Effects of emergency containment measures

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Lorenzo Mari, Luca Carraro, Marino Gatto

The spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Italy prompted drastic measures for transmission containment. We examine the effects of these interventions, based on modeling of the unfolding epidemic. We test modeling options of the spatially explici ...

National Academy of Sciences2020

Flexible Disaster Response of Tomorrow: Final Presentation and Evaluation of the CENTAURO System

Xi Chen, Fabian Maximilian Schilling

Mobile manipulation robots have great potential for roles in support of rescuers on disaster-response missions. Robots can operate in places too dangerous for humans and therefore can assist in accomplishing hazardous tasks while their human operators work ...

2019

Formal Analysis of Human-Assisted Smart City Emergency Services

Mohammad Khaja Nazeeruddin

The concept of IoT-based Smart Cities has gained momentum in recent years. The research in this domain has focused on modeling key characteristics of future smart cities along with exploring their design and implementation aspects from multiple perspective ...

2019

Community-based landslide risk reduction: a review of a Red Cross soil bioengineering for resilience program in Honduras

Silvia Hostettler, Antonio D'Acunzi

Effective long-term participation of communities in disaster risk reduction measures in landslide-prone areas continues to be a challenge. This study aims to evaluate the extent to which community-based soil-bioengineering techniques allow for effective mi ...

2019

Essays on adaptation to rare disasters

Takafumi Usui

This thesis aims to further investigate rare natural disasters and studies adaptation decisions under uncertainty by solving several computational economic models. The modeling of rare natural disasters depends on the treatment of catastrophic outcomes wit ...

EPFL2019

UAV-Based Situational Awareness System Using Deep Learning

Wenlong Deng

Situational awareness by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is important for many applications such as surveillance, search and rescue, and disaster response. In those applications, detecting and locating people and recognizing their actions in near real-time ...

2019

Managing Risks when Using Nanomaterials in Research

Thierry Meyer, Amela Groso, Anna Maria Novello, Elina Buitrago

As the number of engineered nanomaterials (ENM) used in research increases with an incredible speed, health and safety specialists are continuously faced with the challenge of evaluating the risks involved with these materials. Nowadays there is not enough ...

2019

Nonmodel-based framework for rapid seismic risk and loss assessment of instrumented steel buildings

Dimitrios Lignos, Seong-Hoon Hwang

This paper proposes a nonmodel-based framework for estimating story-based engineering demand parameters (EDPs) in instrumented steel frame buildings with steel moment-resisting frames (MRFs). The proposed framework utilizes a wavelet-based damage-sensitive ...

Elsevier2018

EaRL: Toolbox for Earthquake Risk and Loss Assessment of Building Assets

Dimitrios Lignos, Ahmed Mohamed Ahmed Elkady, Seong-Hoon Hwang

Infrastructure (asset) risk management is essential for a resilient environment. Several industries are concerned to improve their building asset preparedness subject to seismic hazard. To this end, the development of software tools that quantify and asses ...

2018

Preface: Special Section on Energy and Food Security in a Humanitarian Context

Silvia Hostettler

Natural disasters, population growth, social conflicts, and political or structural crises give rise to forced migrations, which can lead to humanitarian emergencies. According to the “UNHCR annual global trends report”, 65.6 million people were displaced ...

2017

Localization of emergency acoustic sources by micro aerial vehicles

Dario Floreano, Felix Stephan Schill, Meysam Basiri

For micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) involved in search and rescue missions, the ability to locate the source of a distress sound signal is significantly important and allows fast localization of victims and rescuers during nighttime, through foliage and in du ...

John Wiley & Sons2017

Real-time projections of cholera outbreaks through data assimilation and rainfall forecasting

Andrea Rinaldo, Enrico Bertuzzo, Flavio Finger, Damiano Pasetto

Although treatment for cholera is well-known and cheap, outbreaks in epidemic regions still exact high death tolls mostly due to the unpreparedness of health care infrastructures to face unforeseen emergencies. In this context, mathematical models for the ...

Elsevier2016

Science, technology and the future of small autonomous drones

Dario Floreano

We are witnessing the advent of a new era of robots — drones — that can autonomously fly in natural and man-made environments. These robots, often associated with defence applications, could have a major impact on civilian tasks, including transportation, ...

Nature Publishing Group2015

Learning from vernacular building practices: A starting point for risk mitigation

Milo Hofmann, Annalisa Caimi

In most natural disaster prone areas, vernacular builders have implemented affordable strategies that have proven to perform adequately during natural hazards. Learning from these practices represents a great potential to further strengthen the resilience ...

Crc Press-Taylor & Francis Group2014

Soft Pneumatic Actuators for Legged Locomotion

Jamie Paik, Juan Manuel Florez Marin, Yixin Bai, Benjamin Shih

Search and rescue robots are being used more frequently to access hazardous environments to assess situations and locate survivors. There are a wide range of existing mobile platforms for various situations and environments, but these robots are typically ...

2014