Raising awareness on the provision of public safety services through the most diverse ICT technologies is a key opportunity and one of the most urgent challenges in the field of today’s communication networks.

Relevant scenarios include the natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires or floods that disrupt traditional communication infrastructures, or that displace large crowds, overloading what is left of the communication infrastructure. In these scenarios, people are in need of directions, advice, updates on the current situation and they often need to send out requests for help or to make their location known to rescue teams. Ideally, users should be able to communicate directly between themselves, even in the absence of a cellular infrastructure - a common occurrence in disaster scenarios. However, it is also crucial that solutions and platforms are developed to integrate emergency management data coming from multiple sources, including feeds provided by citizens through social media and crowdsourcing.

The I-TENDER workshop will aim at capturing the research and technology trends that enable such awareness by soliciting contributions along three main directions. First, solutions that leverage the widespread availability of handheld devices (smartphone, tablets) that act as the prime contact point to alert the population of impending dangers and as a locating device for rescue teams. Secondly, data analysis techniques that take into account the pervasive role of social networks in collecting and spreading information and provide accurate checking using appropriate tools. And, finally, emerging networking paradigms that go beyond the traditional infrastructure-based model, rather leveraging disruption-tolerant models and device-to-device communication, such as Wi-Fi direct and LTE-D2D. The workshop seeks original work presented in the form of research papers describing new research approaches and results. Highly disruptive work-in-progress and position papers are welcome, provided they focus on particularly innovative solutions or applications for emergency and disaster relief. We also invite authors to submit papers presenting extensive experiences with implementation, deployment, and operation.