Disaster Lifecycle II

<Sean Barberie's Notes>

Disasters Lifecycle Session II

·         John Evans: Global Science & Technology, inc.

·         Emerging Earth Science Technologies in Disaster Risk Management.

·         Some new tech areas:

·         Cubesat tech will likely increase in use in the next decade—now cubesats are primarily still in a proof-of-concept phase.

·         Drones: increasing use in flood management, risk assessment, disaster response.

·         Crowdsourcing via mobile devices: iShake earthquake monitoring (and similar apps). Attachable and Bluetooth connected sensors for collecting data through citizen science.

·         Sensor web and Internet of Things: many sensors building a continuous monitoring network connected over the internet.

·         Location based services: wireless emergency alerts.

·         Big data analytics: reaching maturity (the maturity of a new tech can be gauged by the criticism, has it entered the phase of disillusionment?).

·         Models as a service: Google Earth Engine (spatial analysis online on Google servers), NOAA READY volcanic ash dispersion model.

·         Collaboration services: centralized and distributed approaches. E.g. Storm Center.

·         Semantic services: still maturing. A way to reconcile the language used in communications across different disciplines and groups. Stnadards for expressing and using semantics.

·         Crowd source cloud computing: e.g. SETI@Home, etc. Great for anything that is embarrassingly parallel-able

·         UAVs offer exciting potential. Can fly at low altitudes with frequent re-visits.

·         A lot of the UAV providers list disaster risk management as an application (which may be a little bit of lip-service) but we might be able to use that declared focus to get participation from such organizations.

·         Data distribution from UAVs still needs to be worked out.

·         Internet of things is growing rapidly and shows a lot of potential but has a lot of maturing to do.

·         We need to exploit relationships among these technologies. They will create beneficial feedback cycles by providing new types of data.

·         Book: Digital Humanitarians

·         I (Sean Barberie) blabbed about TomNod the Digital Globe crowdsourcing remote sensing classification platform. But I have no notes on that.

·         Karen: Can we as a group do an emerging tech awareness program to bring some of these new technologies to the attention of the group?

·         Presentation on Disasters.Data.Gov

·         Meredith Lee: Launching disasters.data.gov

·         Interested in feedback since this is an early stage in the development of this initiative.

·         Disasters.data.gov builds upon the Innovation for Disaster Response and Recovery Initiative.

·         Tech to empower responders, survivors, etc.

·         Homepage features a map of current disaster declarations

·         Data.gov uses a tagging system. Disasters.data.gov uses a disasters tag to isolate relevant datasets.

·         Get involved: asking local agencies to upload specific local data (e.g. neighborhood names, evacuation routes, locations of nursing homes, etc).

·         Suggestion that the Digital Globe app would be a good addition to the apps section of disasters.data.gov.

·         [email protected] for suggestions of improvements or good apps that should be added.

·         Q: Karen: have you developed some criteria for evaluating the apps and data that then might be eventually placed into disasters.data.gov?

·         A: Not the area the speaker is involved in, but one of the major principles is that the apps need to be free or freely available and not make a profit off of their involvement with disasters.data.gov. But the idea of a criteria could be useful moving forward.

·         Karen: This is relevant to our earlier discussion of the ESIP disasters testbed criteria.

o    It may be useful to align some of our criteria with the criteria of Disasters.data.gov.

·          Q: in thinking about data centers, when there is a lot of data, how do you present that to the users? One idea is bundle data sites that will give you a bundle of data specific to a given event. Is this something that is being pursued or could be pursued?

·         A: The tagging system of data.gov may work this way to some extent but currently isn’t done. It is a great idea, though.

·         Q:  How  does someone get their  data products into disasters.data.gov

·         A: email [email protected]

Open forum on information architecture

·         Karen: the idea is to look at what activates we want to explore further as a group for 2015. The idea behind information architecture was to work within our community to share some best practices to share the goals that are set by the disasters community—with a remote sensing tilt—for ways that we can streamline products. The main idea is to look at how people in the community are producing products and understand what is working well. Again, this brings us back to the discussion of a functional criteria moving forward. To a major extent there are a number of communities that are working on these components and what we can do within our cluster is collect that information and make it more available—hence our connection with disasters.data.gov.

·         Maggie: one thing I wanted to mention was, right now we’re working on this transition plan with applied  sciences to get the system into a more operational status and working closely with the state of California to get our systems into their emergency response framework. This spans the past three years. There can be some discussion of how that process progressed and lessons learned from working with California to get things into the right framework for responders to utilize these data products.

·         Karen: that would be an excellent case study. One of the benefits of exploring information architecture is seeing what works for different groups and then sharing that perspective so that other people can follow that path.

·         Maggie: in mid may there will be a large response exercise for the state of California recently upgraded to a national level FEMA exercise. It is open to anyone to participate/observe, so the disasters cluster could tune in and potentially get involved.

·         Close. Gratitude. Telecon next month.