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I. Doukas, G. Retscher:
"The Contribution of Contemporary Sensors to the Management of Natural and Manmade Disasters - The Present and the Future";
Talk: Joint International Symposium on Deformation Monitoring, Hong Kong; 2011-11-02 - 2011-11-04; in: "Joint International Symposium on Deformation Monitoring", (2011), 11 pages.

There is a pretty large variety of all kinds of disasters (either natural or manmade). This established fact, in relation with the axiom that "disasters will always happen", arguably is producing a numerous and extremely complex set of problems (social, environmental, economic and technical). The plethora of possibilities concerning applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN) and/or geosensor networks (GSN), which are a revolution in the physical world observation, forms a disruptive technology very beneficial for many (and different) fields and applications. In general, disaster monitoring, management and environmental observation are indisputably a wide and fertile field with enormous potential related with the advantages of network features such as e.g. densely deployment, dense sensing of the environment, large spatial coverage, robustness, no human intervention etc. The management of disasters demands competent decision support which, in its turn, asks for up-to-date information. WSN or GSN are by some means dedicated instruments which are capable to sample space-time processes and generate lots of real-time data that perfectly satisfies this urgent demand of up-to-date information (even support the frequent update of information for reacting promptly against crisis). For any kind of disaster, there is a five-phases life-cycle (i.e., response, recovery, mitigation, prevention, preparedness) known as Emergency Management and Disaster (Crisis) Risk Management Cycle (DRMC). In this paper, the diffusion of WNS and GSN into the management of disasters (natural and manmade) is briefly reviewed, since such networks are capable to offer their services to every phase of DRMC. Some thoughts concerning the future and "visions" are given by taking also into account their potential through their blending with other technologies/methods/techniques which belong to GIS, structural health monitoring, smartphone localization, pervasive (ubiquitous) computing, and ambient (spatial) intelligence.

Natural Disasters, Manmade Disasters, Disaster Management, Sensors, Geosensors, Smartphone Localization, Pervasive (Ubiquitous) Computing, Ambient (Spatial) Intelligence, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Geosensor Networks (GSN)