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BILL HO: It's been a real pleasure to be here with
everybody here.
We'd like to thank Google for inviting us.
As you probably heard from name, the organization I work
for, Asian Disaster Preparedness Center, we're
actually focusing on the preparedness side of the
disaster risk management.
We're focusing on how do you reduce the impact of disasters
before they happen.
So I think we heard a lot of good things around the various
different panels this morning, some things, for example, like
Margareta Wahlstrom mentioned.
There's a lot of risk assessment data that's already
available out there.
A lot of governments, a lot of technical agencies such as
ADPC, we have done a lot of work in the past on that.
But one of the issues is actually after we hand the
report back to the government agencies, they just sit there
on the shelf collecting dust, basically.
So how do you actually address that issue?
How do you actually make use to utilize that information
for any other kind of research and any kind of usage?
This is what I'm trying to address today.
So I think in supporting the World Bank on the GFDR lab,
we're actually utilizing one of the things called GeoNode.
It's actually an open-source platform.
It's an online repository of risk assessment information.
And on top of that, they actually add a simple
composer, too.
So you can actually modify.
You can actually create your own maps, and other people can
actually download it for further usage.
So I'm going to just give you a very quick demo of this
application.
OK.
Ah, there we go.
OK, so this is actually a map of the country of Nepal.
So we actually did this risk assessment for countrywide
multi-hazard risks for the country of Nepal last year.
And this is one of the maps that actually highlights the
risk for landslide after heavy precipitation.
So what we did is here, you can actually edit
and view this map.
This is one of the unique features of this GeoNode.
So in here, let me zoom in.
So we can actually import--
so all of this data has been uploaded.
You can actually upload a lot of baseline information or
baseline data, for example, the household, for example,
the number of schools, for example, the
location of the roads.
So one of the unique ways we can actually modify and
manipulate this data further within GeoNode so people can
actually download this information further on, for
example, if you want to use development and planning, you
want to know where exactly is the risk so you can actually
avoid them.
Or if it's something that you have to do, you can now avoid
that location with simple mitigation measures you can
actually put in place to disaster-proof the
developmental games of the projects.
So that's the whole concept behind this.
And the good thing about this is it's actually open source,
and people can use that freely.
And you can actually do downloading in the raster file
or in the vector shapefile as well.
So I think one of the key issues we're trying to address
is actually trying to get the right information to the right
person or party at the right time.
So by having this very simple online sharing of risk
assessment information, we hope that we can actually
contribute to the open source data
information flow on the internet.
Thank you very much.
NIGEL SNOAD: Hello.
As I was introduced, my name is Nigel Snoad.
I work in Google as a product manager for dot-org, which is
the philanthropic arm of Google that was mentioned this
morning a couple of times.
And I'm lucky enough to be working with the Crisis
Response Team.
And as it was mentioned earlier as well, the goal of
the team is to make sure that citizens and our users have
access to information that matters in times of a crisis.
And it was noted that the team is an outgrowth of the
volunteer efforts that happened across Google and
still happen.
And we've institutionalized in a small core team some people
who can work on preparedness and tools to make our
responses more scalable and sustainable.
But I used to actually do this kind of work and a bit of this
and make these kind of maps.
And so working with formal response agencies is great.
But ultimately, I came to Google last year because I
wanted to work on providing citizens with critical
information directly about what they needed to keep
themselves safe and to take action.
And we, like everybody else, does a little bit of a
user-facing mapping about what information citizens need, and
there's some pretty obvious categories.
And Person Finder was demoed at lunch, which is the where
are the people I care about?
And then what's happening, and what are the resources I need,
and what can I do to keep myself and my family safe are
very obvious questions.
And it turns out that people come to Google extensively to
find this answer.
So this is a piece of internal data, whereby the two big
spikes are the Chile earthquake in 2010 and the
Japan earthquake last year.
And these are people in Hawaii searching for tsunami.
They were searching for the terms, when's it coming?
Am I going to be safe?
What do I have to do?
Do I have to worry?
Et cetera.
And there were very few good answers anywhere on the web
that were available.
There's some great alerting data that's out there, so we
look forward to trying to do something about that.
And if you want to do a bit more of this yourself, you can
go to Google Trends or a couple of other tools and look
at what people are looking for at different times.
And I encourage all of you to look at what people are caring
about during emergencies and disasters, because there's a
wealth of great information there.
So in the past we've tried to address this problem by doing
things like what we call a Homepage Promo.
Under the homepage of Google last year, we put out a
tsunami alert for the entire Pacific rim basically in
multiple languages that said it's coming and linked to the
relevant information.
That's a very manual process.
It's quite slow comparatively, and ultimately, we think we
can do better.
So one of the things we think we can do is we can help build
the framework for what's effectively an emergency
broadcast system for the web.
And this is only one of the projects my team's working on,
but our goal really is to say OK, we can get authoritative
information and push it to people when it matters.
Because there are many traditional alerting systems
such as Klaxon's and other kinds of straight-up alerts
that go out, including wireless alerts.
But there's nothing if people are on the net and on the web.
So we've built something that looks a bit like this, which,
if you go to Google.org/publicalerts, you
can see a list of the alerts which at the moment just come
from the United States.
This is clearly something we want to change.
And we will hopefully work with some of the people in
this room to change that in the near future.
But this is not particularly interesting in terms of the
list of all the alerts that are active.
I can go to the National Weather Service in the US to
find this information if I care, or equivalent agencies
in Japan, and so forth.
What really matters is that we're able to do
this kind of thing.
In the top left, you can see that there's a severe
thunderstorm warning update.
That's a little bit junky terminology from the National
Weather Service.
But someone searching for pizza near Bonneau, South
Carolina, gets a notice that hey, there's actually a very
severe weather event coming towards you.
So we can use the audience and the people who come to us to
look for things and show them critical authoritative
information when it matters.
And this complements the social information.
Because you can see, click through, and they get all the
details from the authority, which is the US National
Weather Service in this case.
They get some maps.
They get some definitions, which most agencies don't
actually provide very obviously.
And they get news and social context.
It turns out the social context of this, the news and
the repetition, is absolutely critical for people moving
from information to action.
And I could talk extensively about the research on this,
but I'll move on.
We've got to make sure we're optimized for mobile use.
And ultimately, we've got to make sure we take this to as
many of Google's platforms as possible in the future, to
make it a service for as many places as possible beyond just
the straight up net and the web, and to make sure that we
work with partners to get trusted sources of data in a
really secure, automated way, and that
means structured data.
So I kind of wanted to get a little bit real, because there
have been a lot of comments about please make your data
open and available in standard formats.
And people often think purely in terms of geographical data,
the Geodata, the KMLs that have been discussed.
But there's a whole wealth of other data that really matters
that we can unlock and do amazing things with if we
manage to get it open.
So thank you very much.