Not for public

Assumptions

• Software for emergency response can be repurposed for social action

• decision making in the face of rapidly changing situations,

• real-time coordination of a diverse group of technical and social actors

• research on making networks more resilient (white hat) vs identifing pressure points capable of movement by social action (black hat)

(Planetary Network) (Emergency Response)

• A planetary-scale network for emergency response

• Public facing, working in a climate adaptation

• Target customers: governments and NGOs (enterprise), citizens (free and low cost)

(Planetary Emergency) (Response Network)

• Responding to the planetary emergencies in a globally coordinated fashion

• Activist facing, working on climate mitigation

• Target customers: social action networks (free or low-cost)

PERN vs Pern

• Name deliberately plays on the Dragonriders of Pern novels by Anne McCaffrey

• In the novels, a bacronym for Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible

• In the novels, dragonriders are emergency responders against Thread, a mycorrhizoid spore

• Can use book references for releases, web examples

Slogans

• Perceive, think, and act planetarily

• Save lives, the money will follow

Vision

Sketch

• Climate change has been and will continue to lead to large-scale disasters

• Prevention/preparedness - planning for resilience

• Response - rapid coordination of volunteers and professionals to respond effectively to emergency situations

• Relief - coordination of resource flows to affected areas

Technology Stack

Dynamic Social Knowledge Graphs

• Open Street Map

• TerminusDB/TerminusCMS

Cognitive Language Agents

• Information extraction from social media posts, drone imagery, satellite images

• Human/machine interactions to aid decision-making

Empowered Mobile Actors

• Access to real-time information on resilient information networks

• Used by humans and machines

Related Efforts

Planetary Response Network

• Most direct precursor to PERN

• Organized on disaster-specific basis, last used in 2019

• Crowd-sourced use of human volunteers to assess satellite images to help direct on-ground emergency responders

• Used 3,619 volunteers to examine 25K sat imagaes

• Pre-LLM

AI Institute for Societal Decision Making

• Academic groups, NSF funded

• Website identifies emergency response as a key area

• Co-director Coty Gonzalez has done interesting work in dynamic decision-making within cognitive architectures

• Robin Murphy presentation on Decision-Making from Drone Imagery in Disaster Management

Deloitte

• Large consulting company with government contracts

• Well-written web article focused on conventional ER problems

• Not clear if this is a developing line of business

E-KELL

• Chinese academic group, Nov 2023

• EDSS - Emergency Decision Support Systems

• Enhancing emergency decision-making with knowledge graphs and large language models

DisasterResponseGPT

• US Army Research Laboratory, Jun 2023

• Appears to be single-shot planning by GPT-4

• Conference paper presented in HI