Natural Disasters - can we save more lives? Seminar and Discussion on The Indian Ocean Tsunami: causes, effects and responses. A public seminar and discussion at the Royal Museum of Scotland, 3rd February 2005 http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/050125naturaldisasters.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- Speaker: Prof. Austin Tate Organisation: AIAI, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh Title: e-Response: Future Global Emergency Response URL for presentation: http://i-rescue.org/gc/ Abstract -------- International agencies such as the UN's OCHA and the WHO are charged with coordinating the international response to support national governments and the people affected in an emergency situation. In large scale disasters military assistance is often necessary and offered. This talk will initially mention some of the technologies and multi-agency organisational frameworks that were used to respond to the effects of the Tsunami. Then it will mention technologies that are becoming available to improve this situation and how scientific networks and multi-agency coordination mechanisms are a possible basis for a future more effective response. The potential of a progressive response to emergencies and assistance at many levels from personal, through localised, regional to international will be stressed. A longer term vision of global and local sensor networks linked to effective, timely and well coordinated warning and response mechanisms will be outlined and examples of forward looking exemplars indicated. Press Message ------------- The talk describes examples of how civilian and military organisations worked together in the response to the Indian Ocean 2004 Tsunami and the IT systems that were already useful now. Then it describes scientific sensing networks, organisations and systems that could improve the situation in the medium term, and that should be considered as bases for the immediate reponses to be made during reconstruction. Finally, it shows some pioneering longer term work that could set a vision for what will be possible in the longer term to guide the systems put in place and the scope for these to provide a multi-level (personal, family, local, regional, national and international) emergency warning and response system. Biography --------- Austin Tate is Technical Director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and holds the Personal Chair of Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Edinburgh. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland's National Academy), Fellow of the American Association for AI, Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a member of the editorial board of a number AI journals. His internationally sponsored research work involves advanced knowledge and planning technologies, especially for use in emergency response and search and rescue. Some Further Information ------------------------ A focus of our work in AIAI is on crisis planning and emergency response. Our overall group web site is: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/plan/ We have made suggestions for long term globally linked help and emergency response systems... which through a range of fair sized projects over the years we have been working on with the UK and US governments since the late 1980s. This has included work with the US on evacuation and relief operations on a fictional Pacific island, work with the UK Search and Rescue Coordination Centre, work with 4 countries and 30 organisations (which I directed) on agent technologies for large scale multi-national peacekeeping operations where survivability of the system in the face of problems, use of mobile code and distributed execution were key elements, work on personnel recovery for the US, etc. http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/coax/ http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/cosar-ts/ http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/co-opr/ IM-PACs is our Scottish Enterprise funded project in 2004/5 to look for commercial opportunities for this work in disaster and emergency response. http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/impacs/ http://i-rescue.org/ links to some of our student and other projects. One PhD student for example is working now on multi-layered response systems for earthquakes. There is an annual competition to see how well such command, planning and control systems respond to the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake. http://e-response.org/eresponse1.pdf shows the scenario recent UK collaborative project involving a small emergency response needing scientific advice for oil spill in a sensitive area. I have made suggestions before for grand challenges for computing research in these areas... the latest was for a call for grand challenges for DARPA just in mid December... so the first 2 pages of this proposal entitled "e-Response: Pervasive assistance and emergency response on all levels: personal, family, organizational, local, regional, national and international" might be interesting for you to see the breadth of the systems I feel are needed and that I feel are now practical to begin to deploy in their early versions. The building of new communications, roads and built infrastructure in earthquake struck cities, or in other natural disaster struck zones offers opportunities if sufficient vision is used. http://i-rescue.org/gc/documents/GC-eResponse.doc