Information Processing for Disaster Communications

Abstract

This chapter presents the issues on disaster communications. The Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11th, 2011 caused severe damage to the northern coast of the main island in Japan. We report our support activities in Iwate prefecture as well as our findings and experiences. We call disaster communications in this chapter. disaster communications. Following the requests from many organizations and groups of people, we started our support for the disaster area with a few of us in the department of Software and Information Science, Iwate Prefectural University ten days after the disaster. Through our support activities we came across an interesting issue concerning collaboration with people from heterogeneous backgrounds. Disagreements and distrust happened quite easily. We found that trust plays an important role in such communications. In our chapter, we introduce disaster communications as an area for research and practice as well as our trials on the recovery phase after the emergency response.