ICT for Disaster Resilience

Bern Shen MDCDC/PIHOA workshopHonolulu, 5 Feb 2013

• Problem statement & solution hypothesis• Enabling technology trends • Use cases• Legal, policy & implementation issues

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• Properties of resilience– Robustness– Redundancy– Resourcefulness– Rapidity

• Dimensions of resilience– Technical– Organizational– Social– Economic

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Problem statement & solution hypothesis

“In an emergency, you must treat information as a commodity as important as the more

traditional and tangible commodities like food, water, and shelter.”

Jane Holl Lute, Deputy Secretary, Homeland Security (Lesperance, et. al, 2010:3)

Enabling tech trends

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‘92 ‘97 ‘02 ‘07 ‘12 ‘17

First text msg sent

First commercial SMS service

Twitter founded, Facebook opens to general public

US mobile subscribers send & receive more texts than voice calls

More than half of US owns smart phones; 60,000+ health apps

Global SMS traffic, 1012

Global mobile subscriptions, 109

Use cases

• 2009 flu pandemic – Twitter, texting, YouTube• 2010 Haiti earthquake – Ushahidi, Facebook• 2010 Deepwater oil spill – texting• Others…

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“We've seen now… from wildfires in California and Boulder to the recent ice storm and snowstorms...the public is putting out better situation awareness than many of our own agencies can with our official datasets.”

- Craig Fugate, FEMA Administrator, 2011

ICT/social media levels of use

• Monitor• Command/control• Coordinate• Cooperate• Collaborate

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Prevention

Surveillance & detection

Analysis

ResponseRemediation &

recovery

Sample text messages

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Intelligent messaging

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A handful of generic & passive messagesYou should <do

this pretty boring thing> because we said so.

You should <do this pretty boring thing> because we said so.

Status Quo

Yawn. No response.Yawn. No response.

Volumes of inspired, actionable, evidence-based messages created & refreshed continuously

Guilty Message

Gain-frameMessage

Emoticon:-) Message

Message Optimization

Communications Map

CrowdsourcingLifecycle Management

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txt1 txt2

txt4 txt3

Dynamic messaging based on how different people respond to different messages over time using heuristic & predictive models

Multidimensional heat map connecting message type, business rules & performance metrics visualizes data effectively

APIs allowing content writers across the demographic spectrum to infuse the system with fresh messages using strict guidelines

Natural program, patient & seasonal cycles are considered by the analytics to refresh messaging and maintain engagement rate

Legal, policy & implementation issues

• Data privacy & security• Resources• Infrastructure• Social/cultural change• Other…

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Let’s do this.