On thursday and friday, last week, I participated at a security symposium “Digitale Medien und Kommunikation in der Sicherheitsforschung” organized by Volker Vulf at the Institute for Media Research at University of Siegen in Germany. The symposium was an exciting mix of various streams of research combined with presentations by practitioners. I gave a talk on the topic of “Why is it difficult to design IT for firefighters”. Monica Buscher from Lancaster University gave a very interesting presentation of a study in Denmark on how to use interaction technologies to improve situation awareness in temporary control rooms in public events. Leonardo Ramirez from Fraunhofer Institute gave a passionate presentation of the findings from a study of search and rescue at the Paris fire and rescue services.

The symposium was a very valuable event in the sense that it provided excellent opportunities for networking between various research groups across Europe focusing on IT-research for emergency response and civil security.