An Assessment of PIER Electric Grid Research 2003-2014 White Paper

This white paper describes the circumstances in California around the turn of the 21st century that led the California Energy Commission (CEC) to direct additional Public Interest Energy Research funds to address critical electric grid issues, especially those arising from integrating high penetrations of variable renewable generation with the electric grid. It contains an assessment of the beneficial science and technology advances of the resultant portfolio of electric grid research projects administered under the direction of the CEC by a competitively selected contractor, the University of California’s California Institute for Energy and the Environment, from 2003-2014

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

Designing and implementing a distributed earthquake early warning system for resilient communities: a PhD thesis

The present work aims to comprehensively contribute to the process, design, and technologies of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW). EEW systems aim to detect the earthquake immediately at the epicenter and relay the information in real-time to nearby areas, anticipating the arrival of the shake. These systems exploit the difference between the earthquake wave speed and the time needed to detect and send alerts. This Ph.D. thesis aims to improve the adoption, robustness, security, and scalability of Earthquake Early Warning systems using a decentralized approach to data processing and information exchange. The proposed architecture aims to have a more resilient detection, remove Single point of failure, higher efficiency, mitigate security vulnerabilities, and improve privacy regarding centralized EEW architectures. A prototype of the proposed architecture has been implemented using low-cost sensors and processing devices to quickly assess the ability to provide the expected information and guarantees. The capabilities of the proposed architecture are evaluated not only on the main EEW problem but also on the quick estimation of the epicentral area of an earthquake, and the results demonstrated that our proposal is capable of matching the performance of current centralized counterparts

What Is Resilience and How Can It Be Nurtured? A Systematic Review of Empirical Literature on Organizational Resilience.

BACKGROUND: Recent health system shocks such as the Ebola outbreak of 2014-2016 and the global financial crisis of 2008 have generated global health interest in the concept of resilience. The concept is however not new, and has been applied to other sectors for a longer period of time. We conducted a review of empirical literature from both the health and other sectors to synthesize evidence on organizational resilience. METHODS: We systematically searched for literature in PubMed, Econlit, EBSCOHOST databases, google, and Google Scholar and manually searched the reference lists of selected papers. We identified 34 papers that met our inclusion criteria. We analysed data from the selected papers by thematic review. RESULTS: Resilience was generally taken to mean a system's ability to continue to meet its objectives in the face of challenges. The concepts of resilience that were used in the selected papers emphasized not just a system's capacity to withstand shocks, but also to adapt and transform. The resilience of organizations was influenced by the following factors: Material resources, preparedness and planning, information management, collateral pathways and redundancy, governance processes, leadership practices, organizational culture, human capital, social networks and collaboration. CONCLUSION: A common theme across the selected papers is the recognition of resilience as an emergent property of complex adaptive systems. Resilience is both a function of planning for and preparing for future crisis (planned resilience), and adapting to chronic stresses and acute shocks (adaptive resilience). Beyond resilience to acute shocks, the resilience of health systems to routine and chronic stress (everyday resilience) is also key. Health system software is as, if not more important, as its hardware in nurturing health system resilience

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India