ABOUT US

Project Overview
Project Activities
Project Background Material
Project Personnel
      Primary Investigator: David Mendonca
      Students

Project Overview:

This EMPROV project is a research project supported by U.S. NSF (National Science Foundation) CAREER grant (grant number: 0449582). It consists of integrated research and education programs designed to improve how society  understands, plans for and supports improvisation in response to extreme events.

David Mendonca is the PI of EMPROV project.  This work builds upon his prior research on modeling and supporting improvised decision making, which was conducted at the Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Fire Academy and at the Port of Rotterdam, The Netherlands. It also incorporates the results of his investigations into decision making following the 2001 World Trade Center attack (supported by NSF grant CMS-0139306) and complements his current research on decision technologies for the management of critical infrastructures (supported by NSF grant CMS- 0301661).

A key to successful planning and effective response  in extreme events such as natural or technological disasters is flexibility. One approach to achieving flexibility is improvisation: a combined behavioral and cognitive activity that requires creativity under tight time constraint in order to meet performance objectives.

The first goal of the research program is to produce cognitive-level theory about improvised decision making, derived from a combination of archival research, experimentation and interaction with practitioners. The theory will be expressed in computer-executable form and evaluated via experimentation with emergency response practitioners. The second goal is to integrate the computable theory into a prototype group decision support system, whose impact on decision making will be evaluated via experimentation in a computer-based environment.

Project Activities:

Research

• Improve understanding of cognition during improvisation in emergency response.
• Express this understanding in the form of computer programs (i.e., intelligent agents), which are then used to provide decision support in exercises to train for improvisation.
• Distill the research results into educational and outreach materials.

Education

• Develop a course in Improvised Decision Making, to be taught to emergency response personnel in New Jersey.
• Integrate research results into existing New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) courses to strengthen connections between research and practice.

 Outreach

• Develop an online community whose members will include area high school students, NJIT undergraduate and graduate students and emergency response personnel.
• Introduce area high school students to emergency management as a field in which skill in improvisation is valued and required.
• Introduce NJIT undergraduate and graduate students to the possibilities of information system-based careers in emergency management
  
  
   

Project Background Material:

Journal Publications

Mendonça, D. (forthcoming). "Decision Support for Improvisation in Response to Extreme Events." Decision Support Systems (PDF).

Beroggi, G. E. G., D. van Gent, D. Mendonça and W. A. Wallace (forthcoming). "Assessing Group Decision Support Systems for Emergency Response Using Gaming Simulation." Safety Science (PDF). 

Mendonça, D. and W. A. Wallace (2004a). "Studying Organizationally-Situated Improvisation in Response to Extreme Events." International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 22 (2) 5-29 (PDF). 

Mendonça, D., G. E. G. Beroggi and W. A. Wallace (2001). "Decision Support for Improvisation During Emergency Response Operations."  International Journal of Emergency Management 1 (1) 30-38 (PDF).  

Mendonça, D., R. Rush and W. A. Wallace (2000). "Timely Knowledge Elicitation from Geographically Separate, Mobile Experts During Emergency Response." Safety Science 35 (1-3) 193-208 (PDF). 

Conference Publications

Mendonça, D., D. Peraza and P. Stefan (forthcoming). "Innovation, Risk and Reward during Debris Removal at Ground Zero." American Society of Civil Engineers Structures Congress 2005, New York, NY, 20-24 April (PDF).

Chakrabarty M. and D. Mendonça (2004). "Integrating Visual and Mathematical Models for the Management of Interdependent Critical Infrastructures." IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics,  The Hague, The Netherlands, 10-13 October (PDF). 

Mendonça, D. and W. A. Wallace (2004b). "Cognition in Jazz Improvisation: An Exploratory Study." Cognitive Science Society Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, 5-8 August (PDF). 

Hendela, A. and D. Mendonça (2004). "Innovation in Demolition: A Case Study from the Cleanup of Ground Zero." Americas Conference on Information Systems, New York, NY, 5-8 August (PDF). 

Mendonça, D. and F. Fiedrich (2004). "Design for Improvisation in Computer-based Emergency Response Systems." Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Conference, Brussels, Belgium, 3-4 May (PDF). 

Gu, Q., D. Mendonça and D. Wu (2003). "An Exploration of Information-Seeking Behavior in Emergency Management." IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Washington, DC, 5-8 October (PDF). 

Mendonça, D., G. E. G. Beroggi and W. A. Wallace (2003). "Evaluating Support for Improvisation in Simulated Emergency Scenarios." Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-36), Big Island, HI, 6-9 January (PDF).  

Mendonça, D. and W. A. Wallace (2002). "Development of a Decision Logic to Support Group Improvisation: An Application to Emergency Response." Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-35), Big Island, HI, 7-10 January (PDF). 

Mendonça, D., G. E. G. Beroggi and W. A. Wallace (1999). "Decision Support for Improvisation During Emergency Response Operations." The International Emergency Management Society Conference, Delft, The Netherlands, 8-11 June (PDF). 

Non-Refereed Conference Papers

Mendonça, D., E. Lee II and W. A. Wallace (2004). "Impact of the 2001 World Trade Center Attack on Critical Interdependent Infrastructures." IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, The Hague, The Netherlands, 10-C13 October (PDF). 

Lacontora, J. and D. Mendonça (2003). "Communities of Practice as Learning and Performance Support Systems." IEEE International Conference on Information Technology, Research and Education, Newark, NJ, 10-13 August (PDF). 

Book Chapters

Wallace, W. A.,  D. Mendonça, E. Lee, J. Mitchell and J. Chow (2003). "Managing Disruptions to Critical Interdependent Infrastructures in the Context of the 2001 World Trade Center Attack," in Beyond September 11th: An Account of Post-Disaster Research, J. Monday (Ed.), Natural Hazards Research & Applications Information Center, Public Entity Risk Institute, and Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems. Special Publication #39. University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, pp. 165-198 (PDF). 

Beroggi, G. E. G., D. Mendonça and W. A. Wallace (2003). "Operational Sustainability Management for the Infrastructure: The Case of Emergency Response," in Systems Engineering and Management for Sustainable Development, Andrew P. Sage (Ed.), in Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, EOLSS Publishers, Oxford, UK, http://www.eolss.net (PDF). 

Other Publications

Gu, Q. and D. Mendonça (2004) "Group Information-seeking Behavior in Emergency Response: An Exploratory Study." International Conference on Information Systems Workshop: Information Systems-Cognitive Research Exchange, Washington, DC, 12 December (PDF). 

Mendonça, D. (2003). "Decision Support for Improvisation: Prospects, Challenges and Opportunities." International Conference on Information Systems Workshop: Research Directions on Decision Support, Seattle, WA, 14 December (PDF). 

Project Personnel:

Primary Investigator: David Mendonca (Ph.D.)

Brief Bio: David Mendonça is an Assistant Professor in the Information Systems Department of the College of Computing Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ. He has a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. from University of Massachusetts/Amherst.

Research Interest: Prof. Mendonça's primary research interests are in modeling and supporting group decision making under conditions of risk and time constraint. This has principally involved work on improvisation in emergency response decision making. He has also worked in the areas of knowledge management (including ontologies) and multicriteria decision making.

Personal Web page: http://web.njit.edu/~mendonca/

Email: mendonca@njit.edu

Students

Peishih Chang:

Brief Bio: Peishih Chang is a Ph.D. student in the Information Systems Department of the College of Computing Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She has received a B.S. in Information Management at National Central University, Taiwan and an MBA degree majoring in both MIS and Marketing from Pace University.

Research interests: E-Commerce: Website design and establishment, customization/personalization, database integration and conversion; Consumer Cognition and Decision Making: Implications for knowledge management; Decision Support Systems

Publication:

Personal Web page: http://web.njit.edu/~pc33/website/main.htm
 

Qing Gu:

Brief Bio: Qing Gu is a Ph.D. student in the Information Systems Department of the College of Computing Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology. She has received an B. E. in Computer Engineering, Suzhou University, China, and an M.S. in Management Information Systems, Nanjing University, China.

Research interests: Group Decision Making, Group Decision Support Systems, Emergency Management

Publication:

Gu, Q. and D. Mendonça (2005). "Patterns of Group Information-seeking in a Simulated Emergency Response Environment." Second International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Brussels, Belgium, April 18-20.

Gu, Q., D. Mendonça and D. Wu (2003). "An Exploration of Information-seeking Behavior in Emergency Management." IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Washington, DC, October 5-8.

Personal Web page: http://web.njit.edu/~qg3/
 

Abraham Rosales:

Abraham Rosales received his Associates degree in Science, Natural Science and Mathematics, Computer Science from Bergen Community College (BCC) in 2004.  During his years at Bergen Community College, he made the Dean's List for two consecutive years, the National Dean's List, and received the Outstanding Academic Award from the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP), six times.  He was included in the 2004 edition of WHO'S WHO AMONG STUDENTS IN AMERICAN JUNIOR COLLEGES.  He was honorary member of Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society and Chi Alpha Epsilon EOP Honor Society. He interests are sports, pc games, and algorithms.  He is expected to receive a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in May 2007, from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.  Then, he plans to start working towards his Ph.D. in Computer Science.