Information Systems for Emergency Management

Starr Roxanne Hiltz is a sociologist and computer scientist whose work focuses on "human centered" information systems. She is currently Distinguished Professor Emerita, Information Systems Department, College of Computing Sciences, New Jersey Institute of Technology. For 2008-9 she has been chosen as the Fulbright/University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Communications and Media. Her research interests include group support systems (virtual teams and online communities), evaluation research methods, asynchronous learning networks, emergency response information systems, pervasive computing, and the applications and impacts of "social computing" ("Web 2.0") systems. Murray Turoff is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Information Systems Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has been engaged in research and development of computer-mediated communication systems since the late 1960s. He was the designer of EMIS[1]ARI, the first group communication-oriented crisis management system, which was used for the 1971 Wage-Price Freeze and assorted other U.S. federal crisis events until the mid-1980s. He is coauthor of The Network Nation (with Roxanne Hiltz), which predicted the current Web-based communication systems in 1978. He is one of the founders of ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) and he was program chair of the Third International Meeting of ISCRAM in May 2006. He has published a number of recent papers on the design of information systems for all aspects of crisis planning and management. Currently Dr. Turoff is active in research with Ph.D. students and an active consultant on projects he enjoys. Bartel Van de Walle is Associate Professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Visiting Research Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Ghent University (Belgium). His research EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS 395 interests are decision support systems, decision analysis, high reliability theory, and humanitarian information systems. He is founder of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) Community and has organized special sessions, workshops, conferences, and summer schools in this field in Europe, the United States, and China. His work has been published in, among others, Communications of the ACM, European Journal of Operational Research, Decision Support Systems, and the Journal of Management Information Systems. He was awarded a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship in 2006.