iSchool Doctoral student featured in Maryland International Magazine

(College Park, MD 9/12/08)
A paper by doctoral student Philip Wu, Assis­tant Professor Yan Qu, and Dean Jennifer Preece of the University of Maryland's College of Infor­mation Studies ((School), offers insight into what slows down the implementation of SMS-based early warning systems that could help commu­nities better respond to catastrophic incidents. Entitled "Why an Emergency Alert System isn't Adopted: The Impact of Socio-Technical Context," the paper is set to appear in the proceedings of the September, 2008 Human-Computer Interac­tion Conference in Liverpool, England. It examines the "complex interactions between individual per­ceptions and the social context in the system it is situated."

In the case of China, if implementation were a simple matter of the technology infiltrating the society, then citizens of that country would be among the best informed on the planet. "China has a rapidly growing group of mobile phone us­ers and a pretty high penetration rate," states Wu. "As of the end of 2007, there were more than 547 million active mobile phone accounts, an in­crease of 86 million over the end of the previous year. Also, since SMS is much cheaperthan voice calls, SMS is the single most popular cell phone use for Chinese. For example, during April 2007 there were about 182.6 billion short messages sent. So, if you ask me whether SMS-based warn­ing system will help China's emergency response in general, my answer is absolutely 'Yes'."

However, while one would be hard-pressed to find an opponent to the use of this technology in China, there are factors that must be considered before implementing it. First, for natural phenom­ena that are sudden and very difficult to predict, such as earthquakes, there is little to no time to give an advanced warning. Other factors include timeliness of message, wireless bandwidth, and cultural differences within the population. Ac­cording to Wu, the socio-technical context in which a technology is being implemented tends to be overlooked. "Whenever a new system is introduced to a community, you always have to check how the system is going to integrate with the existing system and how the target user group would adopt it. Many questions about contextual elements have to be carefully studied before deploying any technology, especially the tech-nologiesthatintendto deal with emergencies and save human lives," says Wu.