Towards Intelligent Disaster Response Systems

Next Generation Incident Response System (NICS) is a platform developed by MIT Lincoln Lab that is currently being used in Macedonia by the Centre for Crisis Management (CCM). It allows coordination during natural disasters between first responders of various departments and allows them to use state of the art tools to communicate and share information. This research focuses on advancing the platform by introducing intelligent agents to the platform, based on machine learning techniques and natural language processing. Our goal is to leverage data generated in social media and feed NICS with automatically processed information from these media categorized in twelve different needs (categories). This paper presents the current state of our research, preliminary results and final goals.