emergency response teams

Abstract: Smartphone indoor localization requires low-cost, robust positioning across scene transitions and phone-use variations. Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) enables infrastructure-free deployment but accumulates errors from heading drift, structural transitions, and carrying-mode changes. Existing methods often treat contextual cues as a single event stream or local correction signal, limiting their ability to address distinct localization errors. This paper presents a framework enhanced by hierarchical multi-sensor context recognition. A jointly data- and model-driven recognition model predicts environment, scene, and activity probabilities, which are converted into scene-event and action-context segments. Scene-event segments guide scene-constrained PDR correction through corridor heading constraints, landmark attraction, fixed-lag backtracking, and vertical-transition handling. Action-context segments drive action-aware RoNIN-based position compensation for carrying-mode-dependent drift. Experiments on cross-floor and multi-action trajectories against LiDAR-SLAM references show that the proposed framework outperforms PDR and representative learned inertial odometry baselines, demonstrating that hierarchical semantics provide reliable, localization-specific correction cues.

Abstract: Accurate precipitation forecasting remains elusive as physics-based models struggle to resolve mesoscale convection and machine learning often yields physically inconsistent, blurred results that consistently underestimate extreme events. We present FitzRoy, the first system that simultaneously achieves state-of-the-art predictive skill and physical realism over the continental United States. Through a reinforced diffusion framework, where a conditional discrete diffusion model is refined via reinforcement learning, FitzRoy effectively resolves the long-standing trade-off between pointwise accuracy and structural fidelity. Across lead times up to 24 hours, FitzRoy consistently matches or exceeds state-of-the-art models while preserving structural realism and capturing extreme events. Its low-latency inference further enables deployment in real-time operational settings. In case studies such as the 2025 Texas Hill Country floods and the 2026 Missouri floods, FitzRoy signals record-breaking accumulations that existing models largely missed. By bridging the gap between realism and skill, FitzRoy establishes a new frontier for high-fidelity precipitation forecasting.

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in wireless networks; however, ensuring secure communication and efficient energy usage remains challenging. This paper addresses the joint trajectory optimization and resource allocation problem in UAV networks in the presence of a tethered UAV flying center and a malicious ground eavesdropper. In the proposed model, UAVs are equipped with energy harvesting capabilities and can adaptively switch between transmitting, jamming, and relaying roles to deliver data to a tethered UAV center for optimized network performance. An optimization problem is formulated to maximize a utility function that balances secrecy rate, energy consumption, and interference. To address the high non-convexity of the problem and its real-time decision requirements, a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm is proposed to solve the problem and learn the network dynamics. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior secrecy performance, lower energy consumption, and reduced interference compared to conventional and DRL-based methods.

Abstract: Supervising a multi-UAV reconnaissance mission usually means plotting waypoints and watching every drone. We present UAV SwarmAgent, a hierarchical multi-agent system in which an operator states the mission in one natural-language sentence and a ground-station agent writes and executes code that turns it into per-UAV routes. The agent grounds inspection targets in an aerial map with a vision-language model, splits them among N UAVs by balancing route length, and dispatches worker agents that verify incidents with a compact onboard decision model. In simulation over 4 incident types and 3 foundation models, the swarm located the incident in 244 of 255 missions (95.7%). A paired scaling study with one to 5 UAVs shows that flight time follows an Amdahl-type law. The second UAV delivers half of the attainable saving and the speedup is bounded at 1.52x. We discuss what this predictability, and the false alarms we observed, imply for an operator who supervises the swarm, and outline the user study needed to test it.

Abstract: Satellite precipitation products face a persistent trade-off: real-time estimates are timely but less accurate, whereas the most reliable products are often released months after observation. This delay keeps high-quality precipitation information outside the decision window for flood warning and disaster response. Here we report Huayu-Global, a cross-constellation deep-learning system that combines three geostationary sensor streams from five satellites through a common retrieval framework and generates coherent quasi-global precipitation fields every thirty minutes. Across more than a million independent station records from two periods outside the training years, Huayu-Global improves event detection and precipitation-amount estimation relative to the real-time products evaluated and reaches delayed-product-level skill in key metrics. Huayu-Global therefore turns operational geostationary observations into a timely, high-skill precipitation layer for flood forecasting, water management and disaster response. Its cross-constellation design also provides a scalable foundation for incorporating future geostationary missions into hydrological and weather-prediction systems.

Abstract: Post-event building assessment requires linking observed physical damage to its consequences for safety, habitability, functionality, and recovery. Yet post-disaster evidence is often heterogeneous, incomplete, and distributed across images and reconnaissance reports, while recovery models typically require structured engineering inputs. This study develops a multimodal engineering Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) framework that connects post-wind-event damage evidence to physical consequences, building-condition states, recovery actions, and downtime. Image- and text-based evidence is transformed into a provenance-preserving, component-level representation distinguishing confirmed damage, explicit negative evidence, unresolved conditions, and temporary measures. Graph-aligned retrieval combines comparable building scenarios with explicit engineering relationships, while compatibility, contradiction, evidence-precedence, and abstention mechanisms constrain inference under partial observability. Recovery actions are derived from supported damage-consequence relationships, and downtime uncertainty is propagated through an action-dependency network using Monte Carlo simulation. The framework is demonstrated for tornado-affected low-rise residential buildings using reconnaissance and image-based evidence. Comparisons with BaselineRAG and Structured Baseline RAG show improved agreement for key building-condition and recovery outcomes, together with traceable engineering reasoning and preserved evidence provenance. Ablation analyses demonstrate the contributions of engineering context, evidence safeguards, and graph-path traversal. The results support transparent, recovery-oriented assessment from incomplete multimodal post-event evidence.

Abstract: Emergency vehicles such as police vehicles, fire engines, and ambulances require a stable and efficient route optimization to reach life-critical events in the shortest times possible. However, the dynamic nature of urban traffic makes this ideal scenario much more challenging, causing critical life-threatening delays. Traditional civilian navigation systems cannot account for real-time traffic changes alongside vehicle-specific constraints, creating inadequate routing scenarios. This research presents the Constraint-Aware Real-Time Routing System (CARRS), a unified software architecture tailored for emergency coordination. The CARRS architecture is engineered to fuse together classical pathfinding algorithms such as A*, Dijkstra, and Bidirectional A*, with Constraint Satisfaction Problem methodologies. The Design Science Research Methodology is the research framework, and prototyping is the iterative process. The artifact was empirically evaluated using OpenStreetMap data for major metropolitan road networks, combined with simulated dynamic traffic scenarios. Performance metrics focused on route optimality, constraint adherence, rerouting responsiveness, and the potential for future system scalability. Findings revealed the system's capability to generate optimal routes for operationally relevant subgraphs in under 35 seconds, with incremental rerouting responsiveness below 20 seconds. Furthermore, the system achieved more than 90% adherence to vehicle-specific constraints, making the CARRS architecture viable for real-time dynamic routing requirements. This study delivers a routing platform that bridges artificial intelligence-driven optimization with software engineering operational compliance, presenting a practical transformative step toward adaptive emergency vehicle coordination in dynamic urban environments.

Abstract: Classifying disaster-related social-media posts into humanitarian information labels is challenging because individual messages are typically short and context-limited, humanitarian categories can overlap semantically, and the CrisisBench label distribution is strongly imbalanced. This study investigates whether lightweight lexical machine-learning methods can provide effective and computationally efficient classification under these conditions. Using the CrisisBench v1.0 English humanitarian task, comprising 87,455 records across predefined Train, Development and Test splits, we conduct a controlled comparison of TF-IDF representations and lightweight classifiers, with Macro-F1 as the primary model-selection metric. Beyond aggregate predictive performance, the study jointly examines per-label behaviour, directional error patterns, relative decision margins, computational requirements, and the effect of domain-specific training through a tropical-cyclone specialist model. The selected balanced LinearSVC with unigram-bigram TF-IDF and C=0.5 achieved an Accuracy of 0.8282, a Macro-F1 of 0.6578 and a Weighted-F1 of 0.8315 on the held-out Test split. Lower decision margins were substantially associated with prediction errors, while the tropical-cyclone specialist achieved modestly higher in-domain aggregate performance with substantially lower feature and fitting requirements. The study contributes a controlled, label-sensitive and resource-aware evaluation of lightweight humanitarian text classification that characterises not only aggregate performance, but also where these models fail and how their behaviour changes under domain-specific training.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent outputs that lack source support or conflict with local operational constraints. We introduce Self-Reflective Chain-of-Thought (SRCoT), a modular architecture that organizes generation as a closed Retrieve--Reflect--Revise loop. SRCoT separates environment state, persistent knowledge, accumulated experience, and short-term memory into provenance-labeled stores. BM25 retrieval supplies local context; subsequent passes expose intermediate drafts, missing-information markers, follow-up queries, and optional claim--evidence mappings. These artifacts inform retrieval, revision, clarification, or abstention decisions. We examine the architecture through qualitative, trace-based case studies in two fully synthetic settings: emergency medical services and Munich-Sim, an emergency-operations simulation. Local prototype runs on an Apple M4-family laptop with 128 GB memory illustrate source-labeled documentation, explicit gap marking, and structured dispatch-style outputs. The traces also reveal provenance-assignment errors, incomplete evidence coverage, and unsafe assumptions that remain possible despite prompting constraints. These cases demonstrate report-level inspectability and local execution, not comparative superiority, hallucination reduction, clinical validity, or operational safety. The architecture separates retrieval and control from the model interface, but behavior across different models remains to be evaluated. SRCoT is a research proof of concept requiring human review, with its principal contribution lying in an inspectable control procedure rather than a new model.

Abstract: Social media offers timely insight into disaster experiences, yet online communities may not represent those affected on the ground. Uneven participation can bias crisis information systems toward data-rich locations and obscure communities with fewer digital traces. We address this with an adaptive cross-community learning framework that combines text and aggregate mobility signals with socioeconomic and hazard-informed community representations, supplementing sparse local observations with evidence from structurally related cities. We evaluate the framework on the January 2025 Southern California wildfires and 2024 Hurricane Helene in Florida. The adaptive model achieves the highest F1-score in both cases (0.5923 and 0.7615), while augmentation has its strongest effect where original observations are limited. The framework also reveals finer cross-city community-level sentiment variation and stronger sentiment-mobility correspondence than text-only models, with relationships differing across disaster contexts. These findings support crisis systems that better account for context-dependent evidence and improve interpretation of underrepresented community signals.

Abstract: This paper investigates the resilience and self-healing of unmanned aerial vehicle swarm communication networks under severe network partitioning in complex and adversarial environments. To address limited global observability after damage, we develop a damage-state inference mechanism that enables the ground control station (GCS) to infer global failures from sparse local reports without transmitting location-sensitive coordinates. To recover multi-cluster partitioned topologies, we then propose AdDiff-GT, a physics-inspired graph Transformer that incorporates advection-diffusion dynamics into a node-supernode hybrid graph. Local message propagation captures intra-cluster structural relationships, while global attention models inter-cluster interactions. A weighted composite loss jointly considers connectivity restoration, maneuvering cost, motion consistency, inter-cluster coordination, and spatial preservation during model training. We further develop a meta-learning strategy for transferable initialization across damage patterns and swarm scales, enabling efficient online GCS adaptation and distributed airborne inference. Simulations on 8,000 partitioned scenarios, including 5,000 large-scale cases, show that AdDiff-GT achieves effective topology recovery and spatial preservation over six representative baselines. Meta-learning reduces online planning overhead with a minor increase in recovery steps, balancing prior knowledge transfer and online adaptation.

Abstract: Deep learning models, particularly Long Short-Term Memory networks, are increasingly used for operational streamflow forecasting, with ensemble spread providing a signal of predictive uncertainty. As climate change increases the frequency of hydroclimatic extremes, these models will increasingly operate under flow conditions that are rare in their historical records. We therefore evaluate whether ensemble spread remains informative under increasing flows, examining both its magnitude relative to error and its ability to rank errors. Prediction error is approximately $2\times$ the corrected spread at ordinary flows and up to $4\times$ at the highest flows, with the discrepancy increasing with flow (log-log slope $1.30$, 95% CI: $[1.20,1.41]$). Under-dispersion is strongest in observed extreme flows beyond the training record, reaching an $18\times$ discrepancy. This is pervasive and not explainable by conditional mean bias. Area Under the Sparsification Error, a standard distribution-free metric of uncertainty ranking, describing how well a model knows when it is uncertain, indicates near-oracle ranking for ensemble spread ($0.071$), yet ordering by predicted discharge alone nearly matches it. Informative uncertainty ranking can coexist with severe under-dispersion. In deployment, error ranking cannot be verified, yet the spread is available, and it is relied on as the uncertainty signal under increasingly extreme conditions, while systematically understating risk, most severely for the extreme events that matter most.

Abstract: Agentic remote sensing is evaluated on how many questions it can answer, whereas crisis response depends on whether its answers can be relied on and how much of the decision can safely be handed to the agent. This paper argues that \emph{autonomy should be earned, not assumed}: An Earth-Observation (EO) agent should be granted autonomy in proportion to demonstrated reliability, epistemic honesty and verifiability. The position is supported by an evidential meta-analysis of twelve agentic RS/EO/GIS benchmark studies from peer-reviewed venues. Only one repeats runs, three contain unanswerable tasks and none measures calibration. Their own tables show that completed workflows are often not correct (task success exceeds tool-call correctness by up to 54pp on identical queries), that the gap to an expert trajectory widens overall with trajectory length (from 7 to 56pp), and that capability does not predict abstention (Spearman r from -0.25 to 0.50, all n.s.). The paper then contributes three EO-specific trust properties, an autonomy ladder for crisis EO tasks, and a readiness protocol that replays archived emergency activations before any live use. In this context, current evidence justifies assistive roles only.

Abstract: Limited battery endurance remains a major obstacle to persistent UAV missions. Existing energy-replenishment approaches typically rely on battery-swapping/charging infrastructure or on ground vehicles with accessible road networks - assumptions that may not hold in infrastructure-less regions (ILRs) such as remote wilderness, mountainous terrain, and disaster-stricken areas. We formulate energy resupply in ILRs as a distinct logistics problem, in which energy itself must be projected into a region with no pre-existing infrastructure, and proposes a Distributed Energy Relay Framework that enables cooperative energy delivery using porter drones. The framework introduces a Transportation-by-Relay-and-Cache (TRC) mechanism, in which drones relay battery resources toward a mission location. Additional models are developed to characterize battery transportation capacity, relay amplification, energy-delivery capability, operational cost, and reliability. Based on these models, stations independently evaluate their delivery capability and submit bids to a mission coordinator, which selects an energy-delivery coalition that satisfies mission requirements while minimizing cost. Analytical evaluation illustrates the impact of battery characteristics and drone capabilities on energy projection and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework for sustaining UAV missions in ILRs.

Abstract: Speech-driven visual grounding in remote sensing (RSVG) removes the typing bottleneck of text-based interaction and is intended to preserve prosodic intent, enabling hands-free target acquisition in time-critical missions. The direct-audio paradigm, mapping raw speech straight to a bounding box and bypassing automatic speech recognition (ASR), was recently adopted by RSTalker, but what such grounders actually learn about language remains unmeasured. SemEcho grafts a frozen Whisper speech pathway onto a VLTVG grounding host so that speech and text share one decoder, making the paired text, free by construction since speech corpora in this task are synthesized from DIOR-RSVG expressions, a training-time teacher and a fair, same-host text upper bound. On this instrument we dissect three semantic injection channels (feature-mimicry distillation, word-level CTC supervision, and two-stage ASR pretraining) with linear semantic probes, and release Audio-DIOR-R (80,973 training clips; 10 timbres x K=3; Qwen3-TTS synthesis with online sox noise lambda in [0, 0.4]) and Audio-DIOR-Comp, a re-split holding out 17 attribute-category combinations under a 2x2 acoustic-semantic protocol. Our anatomy yields four findings. (i) Whether direct alignment beats a domain-trained ASR cascade is decided by recognizer quality: against a weak in-domain cascade (CTC 0.53) direct wins by 9.0 Acc@0.5 points with transcription errors concentrated on spatial-relation words, but a strong in-domain cascade (CTC 0.029) reaches the text upper bound (80.8 vs. 81.0) and beats even the strongest direct model by 8.8 points; the anti-ASR premise holds only against weak recognizers.

Abstract: Natural disasters such as earthquakes, tropical storms, and floods cause extensive damage to buildings, and rapid, reliable damage maps are essential to guide emergency response. Automating this task, referred to as building damage assessment (BDA), from satellite imagery, has become an active research topic at the intersection of remote sensing, computer vision, and machine learning, particularly since supervised deep learning methods were shown to outperform earlier handcrafted approaches. Yet, despite a decade of intense activity and the release of several large-scale datasets, the field lacks a shared foundation. This chapter revisits the task of BDA from first principles, organized around three pillars: data, evaluation, and methods. We first clarify the candidate task for- mulations and argue for a sensor-agnostic, instance-based definition that tolerates missing pre-event imagery. We then review existing datasets along the axes of sensing modality, temporal configuration, and geographic coverage. On the evaluation side, we show that prevailing practices, largely based on a single aggregate score, are theoretically fragile, and we lay the foundations of a more informative, ranking-based, multi-score protocol. We further review methods ranging from task-specific deep networks to recent Earth observation foundation models, noticing that generalization to unseen events and regions remains an open difficulty. Finally, we discuss how these elements can inform the organization of a BDA challenge, including cross-validation, challenge, and private data-sharing setups designed to build trust between developers and users.

Abstract: Nighttime lights from NASA's Black Marble product suite capture thermal and light emission signals from anomalous events including fires, volcanic eruptions, and gas flaring. Existing detection approaches rely primarily on thermal bands, limiting sensitivity to weaker signals. We propose a novel machine learning framework that jointly models Black Marble M-band and Day/Night Band (DNB) signals to derive a generalized, spatio-temporally robust ensemble of anomaly detectors. The framework iteratively builds detectors that scale across regions, seasons, anomaly classes, and extends over land and ocean. Detection sets at varying confidence levels are derived based on relevant bands and detector agreement. The approach improves true detection rate while reducing spurious detections and results demonstrate strong generalizability with applications in natural hazard monitoring and energy extraction.

Abstract: Heterogeneous multi-robot path planning is a well-studied problem in which agents with disparate kinematic and dynamic models must coordinate to achieve shared objectives. These formulations, however, treat all agents as robotic-their cost models are mechanical and their traversability is sensor-derived. In human-robot teaming, the human partner remains relegated to command and supervisory roles rather than being modeled as a physical co-navigator with distinct mobility constraints and dynamic energy reserves. This work investigates joint path planning for a two-agent human-UGV team in search-and-rescue casualty retrieval scenarios. We model the human agent using the Pandolf-Santee metabolic cost model with fatigue-modulated speed, and the UGV using a rolling-resistance energy model with terrain-dependent speed limits. By exploiting the complementary traversability of each agent-the human's ability to traverse dense vegetation and shallow water versus the UGV's superior speed on open terrain and roads-we optimize casualty transfer locations, termed switch points, to minimize total mission time. Evaluated across multiple synthetic 1km2 environments with procedurally generated elevation and land-cover data, the optimized strategy reduces mean mission time by 5.3% relative to a human-only baseline and by 7.0% relative to a naive human-UGV strategy without switch point optimization, while reducing human energy expenditure by 17.8% relative to baseline. Notably, the naive strategy reduces human energy expenditure by a larger margin (22.4%) but incurs a 2% increase in mission time relative to baseline, illustrating that switch point optimization is necessary to realize time savings from human-UGV teaming.

Abstract: Flooding is an environmental hazard that produces social and psychological consequences for exposed individuals, shaping threat appraisal, perceived coping capacity, access to social support, and confidence in institutional response. This paper studies flood-related wellbeing in Ireland from 2012 to 2025 using large-scale, unobtrusive public discourse from Meta Content Library. We develop a bespoke flood-wellbeing instrument organised with three domains: \emph{affective--cognitive distress appraisal}, \emph{diminished perceived efficacy and agency}, and \emph{perceived relational--institutional connectedness}. We then design a flood-wellbeing reasoning pipeline with large language models to extract multi-indicator, multi-domain flood-wellbeing measures from public discourse at scale. The analysis reveals both stressor activation and social--ecological resilience mediation pathways in Irish flood discourse. Flood stressors directly activate affective--cognitive distress appraisal, diminished perceived efficacy and agency, and perceived relational--institutional connectedness. The analysis further identifies two major mediation pathways: an appraisal--efficacy pathway linking flood exposure to threat appraisal, affective burden, uncertainty, and perceived coping capacity; and a social-buffering pathway in which social and institutional protective resources are associated with perceived efficacy and appraisal of flood-related adversity. The paper contributes an unobtrusive discourse-based approach to flood-wellbeing research by introducing a bespoke instrument, identifying activation and mediation pathways in flood discourse, and producing a temporal dataset for studying wellbeing, adaptation, and resilience under recurrent flood exposure.

Abstract: Geostationary satellite observations are important for wildfire detection and monitoring. The current study evaluates machine learning models for MTG FCI near-real-time fire detection in 1- and 2-km spatial configurations and compares them with threshold-based algorithms. The models were trained and evaluated using VIIRS fire reference data across diverse ecological regions in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The key results are that 1-km models significantly outperform both their 2-km variants and operational threshold products. The constructed 1-km models achieved F1 scores higher by up to 0.36 compared to baseline products. Importantly, the 1-km models detected small fires with higher probability compared to competing models. Finally, the models robustly detected fires up to 260 min earlier than baseline products. To support opensource applications, our trained models are publicly available.

Abstract: In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones have been increasingly adopted in urban environments for applications such as parcel delivery, infrastructure inspection, emergency response, and drone light shows. A non-negligible issue is how to manage the increasing number of drones operated by different entities, to enable them to cooperatively avoid potential collisions and determine conflict-free short-term flight paths in urban airspace. This paper presents a Prediction-Based Short-Term Decentralized Greedy (PB-STDG) guidance algorithm for a structured Drone Road System (DRS). PB-STDG extends the original STDG algorithm by introducing a prediction mechanism that enables drones to anticipate the decisions of neighboring drones using additional information shared in beacon packets, aiming to address the over-conservative behavior observed in the STDG algorithm. Several simulation scenarios are conducted to evaluate and compare the proposed algorithm with STDG. The results show that PB-STDG improves traffic efficiency while maintaining a safety level comparable to that of STDG.

Abstract: We propose a human-factor-aware method of allocating robot supervision tasks to multiple human operators. In scenarios where multiple operators occasionally teleoperate multiple robots to help the robots overcome difficulties, the allocation of the supervisory control tasks to humans needs to consider the real-time cognitive states of individual operators. However, most existing methods assume fixed supervisory capacity per operator and overlook fluctuations in the human factors such as workload and fatigue. As a result, workload distribution can be unbalanced where some operators become overloaded while the others remain underused. Our method dynamically regulates supervisory capacity and allocates tasks in a way that maintains balanced mental workload, prevents overload, and improves overall team performance. The allocation method uses a greedy strategy that minimizes estimated operator workloads with task prioritization. Robots are assigned to operators by reflecting their current supervisory capacity where the required effort depends on the types of tasks. In the user study, the analysis across predefined time intervals shows that the proposed method consistently achieves higher performance and lower behavioral signs of fatigue compared to a baseline method that does not consider human factors. These results highlight adaptive capacity adjustment as an effective preventive mechanism for sustaining operator performance in long-duration, high-demand settings.

Abstract: Precipitation nowcasting demands accurate short-term forecasts under strong spatiotemporal variability. Diffusion models are well suited to modeling complex precipitation distributions, yet existing approaches often introduce increasingly specialized designs, leaving the capability of a standard diffusion architecture underexplored. We show that a standard Diffusion Transformer already provides a simple and scalable foundation for precipitation nowcasting, with domain-specific requirements accommodated naturally within its design space. Based on this principle, we develop NowcastDiT and instantiate this flexibility through two complementary adaptations: a dynamics-aware noise prior for temporally coherent forecasts, and end-to-end reinforcement learning with timestep-aware rewards for meteorological skill. Experiments on SEVIR and MRMS benchmarks show that NowcastDiT achieves state-of-the-art performance in both perceptual quality and meteorological skill. These results suggest that standard DiT can serve as an effective foundation for precipitation nowcasting.

Abstract: Extending reliable nowcasting of extreme precipitation could provide critical additional time for warnings and emergency response during high-impact events such as flash floods. Radar-based generative machine-learning models have enabled skilful hyperlocal precipitation nowcasting, but accurate prediction of intense precipitation remains confined to the first few hours. Because storm-scale structure is predictable for longer than individual cells, a natural strategy is to predict that structure while generatively modelling only the uncertain local growth, decay, reorganisation and initiation of storms. Here we present Microsoft Weather Nowcast (MW-Nowcast), a six-hour ensemble radar nowcasting model that jointly learns a deterministic predictor to capture organised precipitation structure shared across ensemble members, and a generator to produce diverse local residuals around this shared prediction. Across independent test data from the United States, Europe and China, MW-Nowcast achieves higher detection skill than leading methods for heavy and extreme precipitation throughout the 6 h horizon. For the most intense rainfall, MW-Nowcast doubles the available warning time across all three regions, delivering 6 h forecasts with skill previously limited to 3 h for the leading generative baseline. A cost-loss decision analysis shows that MW-Nowcast retains substantial value for a broad range of applications even at 4-6 h, where alternative methods offer little benefit. These additional hours can give forecasters and emergency managers the time to warn and act before extreme rainfall strikes, helping to protect lives and property.

Abstract: Rapid and accurate burn scar delineation from satellite imagery is essential for post-fire damage assessment. Sentinel-3 OLCI, with daily revisit and 21 spectral bands, suits rapid mapping, yet most pipelines treat acquisitions independently, leaving the pre/post-fire change signal unexploited. We present a dataset of 246 wildfire activations (2016-2025) from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, with Sentinel-3 OLCI temporally paired acquisitions. We benchmark spatial and temporal (ConvLSTM-augmented) variants of three backbones (U-Net, SegFormer, ConvNeXt-UPerNet) under two input modes and spectral configurations. Temporal modeling improves segmentation only when pre-fire frames are included, and a 5-band subset matches the full 21-band OLCI configuration.

Abstract: Ensuring operational safety in threat-prone environments remains a critical challenge for multi-UAV networks serving as aerial base stations. This paper proposes an efficient framework to maximize global energy efficiency (EE) while promoting safe operation through threat-aware clustering and reward-based safety enforcement. The proposed framework is executed in three steps. First, a threat-aware K-means (TAKM) algorithm determines the minimum required UAVs and computes safe initial placements. Second, an optimal matching stage assigns physical UAVs to these centroids to minimize energy expenditure. Third, a threat-aware multi-agent twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (MATD3) algorithm dynamically optimizes trajectories, power, and user associations. Simulation results show that the proposed framework achieves zero observed safety violations in the considered scenarios while achieving superior EE and faster convergence than other learning methods and non-clustering baselines. Compared to heuristic optimization, the proposed framework outperforms the greedy particle swarm optimization (GPSO) and achieves performance comparable to that of the optimized PSO (OPSO), while incurring significantly lower online deployment computational complexity. Furthermore, the proposed framework demonstrates effective generalization to unseen user distributions, large UAV fleets, and different threat geometries, while maintaining zero safety violations.

Abstract: Mobile emergency networks can experience independently changing intermediate wireless links on timescales shorter than endpoint feedback can track. When an egress changes after packet emission, feedback affects only later source data, while the on-path node observes the current condition with the affected packet still mutable. This paper presents DINA, a packet-level in-network semantic adaptation method. An image is divided into self-describing spatial packets carrying coordinates, a current representation identifier, and payload. At each eligible node, an offline-trained frozen selector scores compatible operators, immediately transforms the packet, and forwards it without image reconstruction or cross-packet adaptation state. Later nodes can retain or further compact the packet through the same typed compatibility contract. The receiver places available packets by coordinate, fills missing regions with black, and runs a fixed machine task. We realize DINA in a 24-node UAV environment using XDP and AF_XDP. In the primary forest-fire trace, DINA raises deadline tile coverage from 40.4% to 72.6% and classification accuracy from 77.5% to 95.0% relative to forwarding. In an independently trained RescueNet segmentation case, it raises coverage from 65.6% to 91.7% and foreground mIoU from 0.486 to 0.541. Sufficient- and extreme-capacity profiles expose a no-gain boundary and a common task-failure boundary, respectively.

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating in GNSS-denied urban environments require alternative methods for position estimation. Existing approaches based on satellite image retrieval or learned descriptors are sensitive to appearance variation and degrade rapidly as the search area grows. We present a vision-based localization system that matches building patterns observed from a downward-facing UAV camera against a reference building footprint database. Our approach detects buildings in aerial imagery, accumulates observations across frames into a unified map, and matches local building arrangements against reference footprints using a novel geometry-driven descriptor that augments local triangle structure with per-building shape features. By encoding spatial relationships between nearby buildings rather than visual appearance, the system is robust to appearance variations and remains discriminative over large search areas. Evaluations on seven flights across four municipalities in a large metropolitan area demonstrate 100% Recall@1 at search areas of approximately 113 km$^2$ and 254 km$^2$, and 71.4% Recall@1 when expanded to approximately 452 km$^2$, encompassing up to 277,000 buildings. In contrast, baseline methods degrade rapidly and achieve 0% Recall@1 at 254 km$^2$ and 452 km$^2$.

Abstract: We investigate the challenges of enabling effective collaboration between human operators and heterogeneous autonomous agents in complex, dynamic environments by developing an interaction platform that allows study of operator behavior and supports intent inference and decision-making using state-of-the-art frameworks. We demonstrate the extent to which the operator's perception, decisions, and actions could be supported by autonomous systems during search-and-rescue operations with our platform.

Abstract: Accurate flood forecasts several days in advance are essential for flood control, water-resource management, and emergency response. Producing them at high resolution over a continental domain calls for local hydrological detail together with spatial context extending from river basins to synoptic weather systems. We developed Hapi, a U-Net Swin Transformer that uses fine three-dimensional patches and hierarchical shifted-window attention to forecast discharge, surface runoff, snow water equivalent, and soil wetness across the contiguous United States. The model produces 24--72-hour forecasts at $0.05^{\circ}$ resolution, with learned Laplacian task weights adjusting each variable's contribution to training. On 2024 test data using reconstructed weather and land-surface inputs from ERA5-Land, Hapi outperformed an operational physics-based model and a state-of-the-art AI model in flood detection. Independent validation against 3,881 U.S. Geological Survey gauges and a Hurricane Helene case study supported its advantage over the physics-based model in reproducing daily discharge. Controlled experiments showed that learned task weighting strengthens rare-flood detection, which is particularly sensitive to changes in precipitation inputs. Hapi produced a four-variable, 72-hour forecast across the contiguous United States with an average inference time of 0.11 seconds on a single A100 GPU.

Abstract: Navigating toward human callers is an important capability for rescue robots operating where visual contact is degraded or occluded. We present AcousticDiffusion, a semantically conditioned, audio-guided diffusion policy for human-directed navigation. A frozen pretrained audio recognizer processes 10.24 s windows, with speech gating and distress-aware prioritization converting recognition outputs into source-level navigation roles. Microphone-array direction-of-arrival measurements are recursively integrated into a robot-centric Bayesian bird's-eye-view belief field. Ego-motion compensation aligns successive observations, progressively constraining source position while preserving bearing-induced range uncertainty. The semantic belief, recent acoustic observations, audio features, and robot state condition a diffusion model that generates waypoint trajectories. On a synthetic-navigation validation set using recorded audio, AcousticDiffusion achieves a mean end-point bearing error of 11.20 degrees, with 91.78% of trajectories aligned within 30 degrees of the caller. Distractor rejection ranges from 89.20% to 98.99%, and the policy favors a HELP-designated caller over a competing speaker in 91.07% of windows. Deployed online on a ZSL-1 quadruped without additional retraining, it achieves a mean bearing error of 64.9 degrees, compared with 98.2 degrees for A* and 90.4 degrees for RRT, with a mean planner compute time of 6.07 ms. Despite imperfect acoustic localization, the reported mean final source distance is reduced from 3.96 m for the classical planners using ODAS-derived (Open embedded Audition System) guidance to 2.48 m, a 37.4% improvement. These results demonstrate the framework's ability to translate uncertain acoustic observations into closer approaches to human callers.

Abstract: Accurate positioning is increasingly required in indoor and dense urban environments; nonetheless, satellite-based systems are not always available, and standardized 5G localization solutions remain difficult to deploy with commercial devices. This paper presents RUN-O-RAN, an O-RAN-native framework that enables network-centric uplink localization using standard Sounding Reference Signal (SRS) transmissions from commercial 5G devices. RUN-O-RAN xApp coordinates serving and neighboring base stations, enabling non-serving base stations to retrieve SRS-based uplink timing measurements that would be unavailable in conventional RAN deployments, without modifying the UE or existing 3GPP signaling procedures. The framework combines cooperative SRS collection, first-path time-of-arrival estimation, timing-advance tracking, clock-drift compensation, and multi-anchor position estimation into a complete network-side localization service. Experimental evaluation over $150,000$ SRS transmissions validates the proposed framework, achieving meter-level localization under diverse propagation conditions while revealing the impact of anchor geometry and multipath on positioning accuracy. These findings demonstrate that cooperative SRS-based localization can be realized within the O-RAN ecosystem without modifying commercial UEs, providing a practical foundation for future network-native ISAC positioning services.

Abstract: During social movements, protesters need to gather with limited communication means and limited knowledge other than what they observe in their direct surroundings. We propose BeWater, a fully distributed walking protocol that achieves gathering thanks to city information like street length, number of restaurants, number of lanes, or street names. Even though using only one of these observables performs poorly, we show that combining them in more advanced tactics rapidly leads to groups of significant sizes. To do so, our work leverages OpenStreetMap data to perform experiments on several real-world cities.

Abstract: Rapid extraction of structured information from social media is important for humanitarian response, yet existing disaster tweet resources mainly provide document-level category labels without span-level entity annotations. We introduce HUMAID-NER, the first named entity recognition dataset built on the HumAID benchmark, containing 60,000 English disaster tweets annotated in BIO format across ten operationally motivated entity types and yielding approximately 175,000 labelled entity spans. Annotations are generated through a reproducible three-stage hybrid pipeline combining a spaCy transformer model, disaster-domain EntityRuler patterns, and structured regular expressions with priority-based overlap resolution. We also propose a joint multitask learning framework that performs disaster-specific named entity recognition and humanitarian event classification using a shared RoBERTa-large encoder. To reduce task conflict during joint training, the model uses homoscedastic uncertainty weighting with learnable task parameters and a two-stage training schedule that freezes the lower 18 of 24 encoder layers in the second stage. On the HUMAID-NER validation set, the proposed system achieves NER span micro-F1 of 0.841 and classification macro-F1 of 0.761 simultaneously. A real-time web dashboard demonstrates end-to-end deployment. The dataset, models, and pipeline code are released to support reproducibility and future crisis informatics research.

Abstract: Earth system modeling is shifting from task-specific predictors toward foundation models with general spatiotemporal representation capabilities. Although these models can jointly encode dynamic Earth fields, external forcings, and static geographic context for multistep forecasting, accurate point predictions or statistically calibrated intervals alone are insufficient for high-impact applications such as extremeweather warning, flood control, renewable-energy dispatch, and emergency resource allocation. What matters in practice is whether predictive uncertainty can be translated into reliable decision risk under specific actions, loss functions, and risk preferences. We propose a decision-oriented uncertainty quantification framework for Earth system spatiotemporal foundation models. The framework produces predictive distributions of future states and uses a decision risk adapter to map forecast samples, decision context, and utility functions into action-conditional risks. A utility-aware calibration module further enforces reliability at the downstream decision-loss level rather than only at the forecast-value level. Calibrated risks are then used to select warning, dispatch, inspection, or resource-allocation actions. Compared with the strongest baseline, the proposed method reduces decision regret by 18.7%, lowers the missed-event rate from 14.2% to 9.1%, and improves expected utility by 11.6%, while maintaining 90.4% predictive coverage and reducing decision calibration error from 0.083 to 0.047. These results suggest that decision-oriented uncertainty quantification can improve the robustness and operational value of Earth system foundation models in risk-sensitive applications.

Abstract: Aerial robot swarms have the potential to transform time-critical safety, security, and search-and-rescue operations. By coordinating multiple robots, they can rapidly survey disaster sites, map collapsed or GPS-denied environments, and search cluttered areas faster than a single robot, reducing response times and minimizing risks to first responders. Realizing this potential, however, requires robust autonomous swarm navigation, which remains an active research challenge. Progress is further constrained by existing platforms, as commercial drones are often closed-source or lack the onboard computational resources needed for agile, vision-based collective flight. Moreover, developing, deploying, and maintaining software across multiple aerial robots requires significant engineering effort. To address these challenges, we present SwarmNxt, an open-source software platform built on the open-source OmniNxt drone hardware. SwarmNxt provides an end-to-end toolkit, including detailed hardware assembly instructions with a video tutorial, automation tools for parallel software deployment and swarm-wide updates, and a ROS 2-based framework for autonomous navigation. The platform integrates state-of-the-art control, planning, and depth estimation into a single ROS 2 multi-agent system, providing an open research infrastructure for physical swarm experimentation. We validate SwarmNxt through two real-world experiments: a six-drone swarm performing decentralized planning with high-speed inter-drone collision avoidance, and a four-drone swarm executing collective flight with onboard depth estimation in an obstacle-filled environment. Both experiments were run indoors with global position from external motion capture; perception, planning, and control run onboard.

Abstract: Hurricane Helene produced the largest absolute cell-site outage in the public FCC record, peaking at 4562 sites. The conventional model is physical: towers destroyed. Helene did destroy over 1700 miles of fibre, but almost none of it was cell sites. We present the first cause-decomposed study of the FCC's Disaster Information Reporting System, reconstructing 80 state-days and 580 county-days from 24 daily filings by two reconciled independent extractions. Damage to cell sites is negligible: 1.1% of attributed cell-site-days across six states, at most 3.8% anywhere. The sites were standing. What took them out divides by terrain: pooled, power dominates at 63.2%, but in mountainous North Carolina severed transport (backhaul) reaches 52.2% against 47.3%, and in Tennessee 69.9%. North Carolina's transport share rises from 7.0% to 85.0% across the event (\r{ho} = 0.92). Seventeen days after landfall, on 15 October, 47 sites lost transport across six contiguous North Carolina counties with no rainfall, no power loss, no damage, and recovery by the next report. Independent active-probe measurement corroborates it: responsive /24s fall 1.02% for twelve hours while Tennessee stays flat. We release the dataset. Backup power is the standard resilience investment; here it addresses the smaller half of the problem.

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong progress on vision-language tasks, yet their reliability in safety-critical settings remains underexplored. Fire-smoke understanding is central to public safety and disaster response, but most existing benchmarks lack diverse real-world scenarios and context-aware evaluation. We introduce SAFIRE, a large-scale benchmark for fire-smoke understanding in MLLMs, comprising 83K captioned images from 20 scenarios and 193K multiple-choice VQA (MCVQA) generated from a 9.7K-image subset, spanning 10 evaluation dimensions from basic perception to higher-order reasoning. A GPT-5.4-assisted multi-stage verification pipeline with MLLM majority voting ensures annotation quality. Evaluating ten open-source MLLMs (8B-38B) yields an average accuracy of 61.9%, exposing major gaps in safety-critical reasoning. We further show that adapting vision encoders with only 7% of our domain-specific data boosts fire-scene classification accuracy from 20.1% to 64.5%, indicating that carefully curated data can yield substantial gains even when data volume is limited. All datasets, models, and code are available at https://risys-lab.github.io/SAFIRE/.