The instrumentation of the world with diverse sensors, smart phones, and social networks acquires exascale data that offer the potential of enhanced science and services. In particular, a better societal management of the overall cycle of disaster monitoring and response becomes possible, citizens may now become involved in decision making and data acquisition (crowd-sourcing), and advanced planning can conserve resources.Current systems are limited in three important elements: (i) lack of methods for handling heterogeneous data streams in real-time,(ii) absence of social computing integrated with big data analysis, (iii) real-time prediction and alarm capabilities have not yet been incorporated into the infrastructure for intelligent management.The goal of the INSIGHT project is to radically advance our ability of copying with emergency situations in Smartcities by developing innovative technologies, methodologies and systems that will put new capabilities in the hands of disaster planners and city personnel to improve emergency planning and responseIt brings together a strong group of researchers with domain experts in three representative case studies of urban transportation, flood management, and emergency response. A large collection of data sets of different types ranging from Twitter to Traffic Flow Sensing and Mobile Phone Data are available and in use by the project partners Dublin City Council, German Federal Office of Disaster Assistance BBK, Fraunhofer, University of Athens and Technion. Their value will be enhanced by data analysis and data fusion. Geographically and socially correlated aspects will be taken into account by novel methods for streams, parallel data handling (Hadoop, GPUs), and data analysis. Data will be enriched by pro-active social computing with incentives and prepared for different usages. INSIGHT aims at a participatory approach to the automated management of resources and emergency response in smart cities and countries.