Responding to emergencies quickly and efficiently is a challenge that communities have always faced. Thanks to emerging emergency response technologies, it’s becoming easier for responders to assess threats, share information, and plan emergency responses. Many of the latest innovations in emergency response are poised to revolutionize the way response teams analyze events and coordinate their activities, while others are dramatically changing the way everyday citizens handle emergencies. Such technologies, at the system level, can design robust systems, resilient networks and interoperable protocols in challenged situations. At the information level, they can build situational awareness from large-scale, multi-modal information. At the application level, social media research can provide actionable insights upon which decisions can be made. While the use of drones, satellite imagery through GIS and social media has already made their way to emergency response, there is a lot more happening behind the scenes that can have an impact too.

The goal of the International Workshop on Emergency Response Technologies and Services (EmeRTeS) 2019 is to explore the application of new and innovative technology research towards improving emergency response and management. The focus is to provide an inter-disciplinary platform for researchers to exchange ideas, present results, share experience, stimulate new research, and foster collaborations among computer scientists, engineers, social scientists, representatives from Govt. and NGOs and disaster science experts for delivering the right information to the right people at the right time during crisis response. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Emergency communication infrastructures, technologies and services
• Peer-to-peer networks based emergency communication systems and protocols
• Modeling and simulation tools for emergency situations
• Crowd sourcing, remote sensing, cyber-physical systems for emergency response
• Coordination, collaboration and decision support systems
• Logistics and supply chain management in emergency response
• IoT based solutions for emergency response
• Querying and filtering of heterogeneous, multi-source and multi-modal situational data
• Post disaster damage and loss assessment
• Planning, foresight and risk analysis
• Security and privacy issues in situational information sharing
• Social media and networks for emergency response and management
• Web mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for emergency response
• Emergency management information systems and applications
• Community participation in emergency management