ogy, Calit2 has developed a peer-to-peer incident notification system that builds on the concept of human sensors. The human sensors collect and relay information about events, such as wildfires and traffic accidents, to first responders and the general public using mobile phones.

The notification system is available across all of California’s major cities and is based on speech recognition, allowing commuters to call in and report incidents, or call in and listen about events that could disrupt their travel. Content is self-regulated with users flagging incidents that are irrelevant or abusive, and the notification system includes algorithms that rate users who report incidents. Conversely, the system can notify all users of an incident via a voice call or text message.

“If you see an accident and call 911,
the police come, the local radio station
picks up what has happened and trans-
mits the problem, but that’s often too
late to allow commuters to get off the
highway,” Ganz Chockalingam, princi-
pal development engineer at Calit2 and
developer of the notification system, ex-
plains. “The incident notification system
is successful because there is no middle
man and no time delay. Typically, we get
about 1,000 calls a day, but during the
California wildfires [in 2009] that went
up to about 10,000 calls a day.”
Unlike traditional disaster manage-
ment systems that are inflexible and
constrained by capacity, this peer-to-
peer system can scale to deliver real-
time information during a disaster as
there is no single channel of informa-
tion and no single point of information
control. The project is currently fund-
ed by Calit2, although Chockalingam
points out that costs are relatively low as
much depends on user technology.

Disaster response
needs to “move
in the direction
of community
response, developing
media centers that
accommodate citizen
journalists,” says
Kathleen tierney.

new thinking, new tools

Stepping out of research labs and into the commercial world, disaster management development follows the path of improved global communication and social networking. ImageCat, a risk-management innovation company based in Long Beach, CA, works with government, industry, and research organizations to develop new thinking, tools, and services that are available to both government agencies and businesses, such as insurance companies that need to estimate losses after a disaster.

ImageCat also concentrates on remote sensing and geographic information systems. One recent development is a virtual disaster viewer, a Web-based system that uses remote sensors to gather information that can be displayed and used to assess the aftermath of disaster. The viewer is a social networking-type tool to which researchers and the public can

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add information. It was tested during the 2008 earthquake in the Sichuan province of China, with about 100 engineers accessing before and after satellite imagery to monitor the extent of damage in the region.

“The viewer allows users to conduct
a virtual disaster survey without leav-
ing their desks,” says ImageCat CEO
Ronald Eguchi. “In the future, people
at the scene who take pictures with
mobile phones will be able to upload
them to the viewer. We are in discus-
sion with the United Nations about
how it could use the viewer in disaster
management.”
With a myriad of sensors around
the world and optical and radar satel-
lite images of an adequate resolution
to see people on the ground, the possi-
bilities of gathering and sharing data,
such as earthquake, coastal, and hur-
ricane images, are almost boundless
and could support significant humani-
tarian relief efforts.

The benefits of satellite images in disaster response are not limited to countries that own satellites, however, and disaster-struck countries can activate a clause of the Charter of the United Nations that requires imagery to be made available to a nation in distress.

Eguchi believes much more can be done with technology to save lives in a disaster, but also recognizes the realities of aid agencies. “Technologies such as the virtual disaster viewer are new to aid agencies. Agencies need technology that is tested and validated, that adds value to what they do and demonstrates efficiency in getting the right information to the right people at the right time,” he says.

UNICEF workers say the best in-field technologies for disaster management are simple to use, low maintenance,

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2010 ACM Fellows Nominations

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