On 19 March, 2021, the workshop “Understanding the big data in emergency management: agenda for future research” was successfully organized by Dr. Ming Ren from Renmin University of China, with her partners Dr. Ziqi Zhang and Dr. Jun Zhang from the University of Sheffield, UK. Prof. Xiaomi An has attended this workshop as a panelist.

It has become one of national priorities to develop and improve the techniques for emergency management, and big data is playing a more and more important role in the lifecycle of emergency management. Timely and effective ER relies highly on the integration and utilization of the heterogeneous data. So, it has become a top priority for the researchers and also policy makers, to have a better understanding of the big data and their use in EM and the decision making. This is an emerging and interdisciplinary research area that calls for collaborations between researchers with various background. The organizers attempt to develop a multi-disciplinary forum consisting of different parties that will continue collaborations in this field in the future.

The workshop consists of two invited talks by experts from China and UK. Prof. Fabio Ciravegna (University of Sheffield) gave a talk on social media mining for emergency management, and Prof. Xianhua Wu (Shanghai Maritime University) gave a talk on natural disaster management based on big data. The workshop also includes a presentation by the organizers and a panel discussion. Scholars and participants from UK, US and China with different backgrounds have made it a fruitful and successful event. The participants have seen the potential of extending this event to a series of future events in this area, and creating a further platform for communicating on the research and practice on emergency management.