Connie M. White

Connie White earned her PhD in Information Systems from the College of Computing Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.  She is a Research Fellow working on the Crisis Communication Research Project with Columbia College Chicago.  Dr. White is the Director of Information Technology Solutions for Emergency Management (ITSFEM), an education and consultation firm.  She has published work in the Journal of Emergency Management (JEM), The International Association of Emergency Manager's Bulletin (IAEM), International Journal for Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (IJISCRAM).

 

Her current work explores how collaborative applications, social media, Free and Open Source Systems and Web 2.0 technologies can be leveraged together to support the decision making needs of crisis managers. Challenges arise in capturing the important information and directing the right information to the right people at the right time.  Another research focus is in using spatial-temporal geographical information systems and social media to help provide information on the outer rural areas that have the least amount of connectivity through crisis mapping.  Other research efforts explore using virtual worlds such as Second Life, as a teaching tool for practitioners.  Her dissertation, A Dynamic Delphi System to Support Decision Making by Large Groups of Crisis Management Experts, focuses on the creation of a crisis management system that is used by large groups dispersed geographically where decisions must be made under uncertainty and among domain driven subgroups.  The end result of this effort produced an application contributed to the Sahana Disaster Management System, Eden, a free and open source system created in response to the Asian Tsunami, which has been used all over the world, most recently in the Haiti Earthquake response and the floods of Pakistan.  Her research interests include Social Media, Decision Making, Scales, Sahana, Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgment, Artificial Intelligence and Emergency Management. Homepage:http://conniemwhite.com