5,459 research outputs found
Flooding through the lens of mobile phone activity
Natural disasters affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide every year.
Emergency response efforts depend upon the availability of timely information,
such as information concerning the movements of affected populations. The
analysis of aggregated and anonymized Call Detail Records (CDR) captured from
the mobile phone infrastructure provides new possibilities to characterize
human behavior during critical events. In this work, we investigate the
viability of using CDR data combined with other sources of information to
characterize the floods that occurred in Tabasco, Mexico in 2009. An impact map
has been reconstructed using Landsat-7 images to identify the floods. Within
this frame, the underlying communication activity signals in the CDR data have
been analyzed and compared against rainfall levels extracted from data of the
NASA-TRMM project. The variations in the number of active phones connected to
each cell tower reveal abnormal activity patterns in the most affected
locations during and after the floods that could be used as signatures of the
floods - both in terms of infrastructure impact assessment and population
information awareness. The representativeness of the analysis has been assessed
using census data and civil protection records. While a more extensive
validation is required, these early results suggest high potential in using
cell tower activity information to improve early warning and emergency
management mechanisms.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Global Humanitarian Technologies Conference (GHTC)
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Why Information Matters: A Foundation for Resilience
Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, a research project by the Internews' Center for Innovation & Learning, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, combines Internews' longstanding effort to highlight the important role ofinformation with Rockefeller's groundbreaking work on resilience. The project focuses on three major aspects:- Building knowledge around the role of information in empowering communities to understand and adapt to different types of change: slow onset, long-term, and rapid onset / disruptive;- Identifying strategies and techniques for strengthening information ecosystems to support behavioral adaptation to disruptive change; and- Disseminating knowledge and principles to individuals, communities, the private sector, policymakers, and other partners so that they can incorporate healthy information ecosystems as a core element of their social resilience strategies
End-user engagement in the design of communications services: lessons from the rural Congo
End-user engagement is considered essential when designing new socio-technical systems, but in the context of designing large-scale infrastructural systems, such as communications networks, this ideal is rarely put into practice. We examined the challenges in engaging end-users in the design of communications services, by exploring how communities from 15 villages in the rural Congo, incorporated mobile phones into their daily lives. To analyze the changes in social and cultural capital that resulted from mobile phone use, we applied Bourdieu’s capital theory. This analysis exposed the difference in perceived value of the communication services between end-users and the business owners of the infrastructure. The paper concludes by suggesting new forms of partnership with end-users in order to craft ways in which infrastructures, and related organizations and practices, can best cohere with local cultural views, specifics, beliefs, needs, or realities of concerned participants
Weak nodes detection in urban transport systems: Planning for resilience in Singapore
The availability of massive data-sets describing human mobility offers the
possibility to design simulation tools to monitor and improve the resilience of
transport systems in response to traumatic events such as natural and man-made
disasters (e.g. floods terroristic attacks, etc...). In this perspective, we
propose ACHILLES, an application to model people's movements in a given
transport system mode through a multiplex network representation based on
mobility data. ACHILLES is a web-based application which provides an
easy-to-use interface to explore the mobility fluxes and the connectivity of
every urban zone in a city, as well as to visualize changes in the transport
system resulting from the addition or removal of transport modes, urban zones,
and single stops. Notably, our application allows the user to assess the
overall resilience of the transport network by identifying its weakest node,
i.e. Urban Achilles Heel, with reference to the ancient Greek mythology. To
demonstrate the impact of ACHILLES for humanitarian aid we consider its
application to a real-world scenario by exploring human mobility in Singapore
in response to flood prevention.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, IEEE Data Science and Advanced Analytic
Developing a Framework for Stigmergic Human Collaboration with Technology Tools: Cases in Emergency Response
Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), particularly social media and geographic information systems (GIS), have become a transformational force in emergency response. Social media enables ad hoc collaboration, providing timely, useful information dissemination and sharing, and helping to overcome limitations of time and place. Geographic information systems increase the level of situation awareness, serving geospatial data using interactive maps, animations, and computer generated imagery derived from sophisticated global remote sensing systems. Digital workspaces bring these technologies together and contribute to meeting ad hoc and formal emergency response challenges through their affordances of situation awareness and mass collaboration. Distributed ICTs that enable ad hoc emergency response via digital workspaces have arguably made traditional top-down system deployments less relevant in certain situations, including emergency response (Merrill, 2009; Heylighen, 2007a, b). Heylighen (2014, 2007a, b) theorizes that human cognitive stigmergy explains some self-organizing characteristics of ad hoc systems. Elliott (2007) identifies cognitive stigmergy as a factor in mass collaborations supported by digital workspaces. Stigmergy, a term from biology, refers to the phenomenon of self-organizing systems with agents that coordinate via perceived changes in the environment rather than direct communication. In the present research, ad hoc emergency response is examined through the lens of human cognitive stigmergy. The basic assertion is that ICTs and stigmergy together make possible highly effective ad hoc collaborations in circumstances where more typical collaborative methods break down. The research is organized into three essays: an in-depth analysis of the development and deployment of the Ushahidi emergency response software platform, a comparison of the emergency response ICTs used for emergency response during Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and a process model developed from the case studies and relevant academic literature is described
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