PetaBencana.id: Software as Infrastructure - Christina Geros - FOSSASIA Summit 2017
Channel: FOSSASIA
Date: 2017-03-19

Speaker(s): Christina Geros (Jakarta)

Abstract:
The presentation will include the most recent events and updates regarding PetaBencana.id and the monsoon season in Indonesia. PetaBencana.id is a community-led, open source risk map for Indonesia; the project is supported by the Humanitarian Infrastructures Group of the Urban Risk Lab at MIT, with the aim of further developing CogniCity Open Source Software as a free, transparent, enterprise-level platform for emergency response and disaster management in megacities in South and Southeast Asia. As these cities become increasingly complex systems of people and interconnected infrastructure, extreme weather events and long term environmental changes pose acute challenges for disaster response and humanitarian action.Although rapidly urbanizing environments are often thought to be “data scarce,” by enabling residents to share emergency data openly and in real time, PetaBencana.id makes a wealth of information available that promotes resilience to extreme weather events. By gathering, sorting, and visualizing data, PetaBencana.id transforms the noise of social and digital media into critical information for residents, communities, and government agencies. The platform adopts a  “people as sensors” paradigm, where confirmed reports are collected directly from the users at street level in a manner that removes expensive and time-consuming data processing. This framework creates accurate, real-time data which is immediately made available for users and first responders. The CogniCity OSS was designed, tested, and deployed as an operational platform in Jakarta during a three-year (2013-2016) applied research project. As a “proof of platform,” the free web-based flood map PetaJakarta.org was used by hundreds of thousands of residents during monsoon flooding. It is was also adopted by the Jakarta Emergency Management Agency (BPBD DKI Jakarta) to monitor flood events, to improve response times, and to share emergency information with residents. CogniCity OSS proved the value of crowdsourced social and digital media for emergency response through the PetaJakarta.org platform, but this use of open data for humanitarian disaster response is only a first step. Additional CogniCity OSS modules are in development at the MIT Urban Risk Lab to address other hazards, including earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, typhoons, and terrorism. CogniCity OSS is also being designed to integrate and coordinate additional data sources, including various instant messaging services. And, as CogniCity OSS is deployed as a disaster risk management system in other Asian megacities, additional platform extensions and innovations will provide additional support for humanitarian response to urban disasters.

(Type: Talk | Track: AI & Machine Learning | Room: Mendel (Ground Floor))

Event Page: http://2017.fossasia.org

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