White House Innovation for Disaster Response and Recovery Brainstorming

Posted by admin on Aug 28, 2013 at 3:57 pm America/Chicago

A big shout out for the FEMA Think Tank team for their White House Innovation for Disaster Response and Recovery Brainstorming session. The focus was primarily on citizen to citizen informatics for relief, but one of the 10  "winning" topics was something that researchers here have been working on: crowd sourcing imagery. James Caverlee and John Mander as part of the Center for Emergency Informatics, our "mother" center, have been exploring what it takes to understand the state of damage from a civil engineering perspective with funding from NSF. Just a note that robotics generally provide public sector to public sector informatics (deployed by an agency, data is used by an agency) that is mostly used for response and recovery, versus relief efforts.  Robots, especially UAVs, could contribute to the crowd sourcing of imagery, so even though robotics wasn't one of the top 10 ideas, it was hidden in there!