Project rescue: Challenges in responding to the unexpected

This paper provides an overview of Project RESCUE, which aims to enhance the mitigation capabilities of first responders in the event of a crisis by dramatically transforming their ability to collect, store, analyze, interpret, share and disseminate data. The multidisciplinary research agenda incorporates a variety of information technologies: networks; distributed systems; databases; image and video processing; and machine learning, together with subjective information obtained through social science. While the IT challenges focus on systems and algorithms to get the right information to the right person at the right time, social science provides the right context. Besides providing an overview of the nature of RESCUE research activities the paper highlights challenges of particular interest to the internet imaging community.