Jao Surakitbanharn BBL talk 25/01 12-13, lobby

Dr. Chittayong (Jao) Surakitbanharn is the Executive Director of the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative (SURI). He will give a BBL lecture titled 'The impact of new data streams on disaster decision making and community resilience'. 25/01 12-13, lobby. Abstract: New data streams like social media, GPS phone tracking, as well as drone, satellite, and network camera images can provide novel insights into the interaction between social behavior and the built environment in ways not possible a decade ago. In the context of natural disasters and extreme events, insights that range from capturing population movements flows to crowdsourced reports of damage can help city planners and emergency planners allocate aid and resources. However, there are not only technical challenges to harness and compute novel data streams, but also cognitive and workflow challenges to use the data for decision making effectively. This talk first highlights efforts and partnerships between researchers at Stanford and beyond, government agencies ranging from FEMA to local fire departments, and data generating corporations to unlock the capability of new data streams for disaster management. We then discuss the impact of new data on common themes in the disaster management domain such as situation awareness and social capital and highlight future research themes.