The Future of Crisis Informatics

Updates pertaining to a really cool project will be coming in the next couple weeks!

SocialRoots

[INSPIRED_8] Tensions in Myanmar

Throughout the course of some of my blogs, I've talked about how hard it is for some humanitarian aid organizations to enter a country and help people when there is political unrest and conflict between groups.  I've talked about countries like Somalia, where al-Shabaab fights against government forces over areas of the country to control the areas, all in hopes of spreading the rule of Sharia.  Somalia also has political conflict, where Somaliland and Puntland governments disagree and the Transitional Federal Government can't do anything to find agreements to such arguments.  This just makes an outright mess for humanitarian organizations that want to help the innocent civilians.  Somalia is only one example, and we are seeing more instances of such conflict around the world come about.

Moving over to the south of China, Myanmar, formally known as Burma, has become a target for sectarian violence and governmental conflicts.  For the past decade, there have been some complicated issues facing the country.  The military has set in to protect high value individuals from sectarian groups wanting harm on the other party.  Because of the violence and conflict, people have been fleeing, running from the sounds of gunfire.  Guerilla groups have captured many people fleeing, but have noted that they were merely doing it to protect them from the government's military force.  But skepticism arrives, especially since each group has mounted attacks on each other's civilians as well.  In the future, there have been rumors that the military will be launching an offensive to remove members of the rebel guerilla groups.

In a country torn by ethnic and political strife, there is no doubt that human rights violations have occurred on both sides.  The rebel groups have been accused of using landmines, which are forbidden by international law, and child soldiers.  The military groups and government have been accused of committing "extrajudicial murders," using child soldiers, and committing rape in the name of ethnic cleansing.

To me, it seems that there is little hope for what is going on in southeast Asia.  Humanitarian organizations have a hard time getting into these kind of countries, let alone have the ability to help people inside without getting killed by one of the combating forces.  It seems that no matter how far negotiations go, or no  matter what kind of deals are made between the two groups, fighting continued, dragging women and children into the battle zone.  For as much as some of us would like to step in, much like Somalia, it's hard to do anything without people dying, and this includes working as a UN aid officer or a NGO's volunteer, preventing yourself from being killed in the line of duty.  We will have to wait and see how things play out over the next few months, but one thing is for sure; people will continue to flee, and warriors will continue to be killed.

[INSPIRED_7] Syrian Relief Efforts

It seems that since the dawn of the Arab Spring, countries directly affected by the rise of protesting and violence continue to face hardships.  No matter what the people do, their oppressive regimes continue to wreak havoc by raiding protest leaders' homes and killing civilians in the streets.  The time has come for Syria, to allow humanitarian aid communities to help those barely surviving in the country.  Although the government will only acknowledge the deaths of a few civilians, watchdog groups have counted over four thousand bodies from police shootings and other raids.  Now, the UN is crying out loud to have their help enter the country.

Somehow, I doubt that Assad's regime is going to let anyone into the country.  A couple months back, Assad's regime specifically ordered all foreign reporters out of the country.  Continuing to this day, there is no legal way for any reporters to get into Syria without explicit permission by Assad's "cabinet."

The UN has a right to be concerned, but again, Syria has become a conflict zone and any kind of operations that try to fix a problem or one that tries to save the "rebels" or the "oppressors" will have to pick a side to who they help and why.  From both sides, if the protesters see police being helped, there will be a serious problem, and if the police see the UN stepping in to help the protesters, the UN will become targets for suppression.  This is of course, if the UN even gets a chance to enter the country, which it currently can't do.

If Syria takes a downturn for the worst, who is to say that anyone will ever be let into the country as assistance?  Buffer zones were a concept at one point, but through militant actions in places like Somalia, we've all seen that it really doesn't matter who is in what zones.  Everyone becomes a target of military action, and then other militaries will need to step in to let aid workers do their thing.

Though action may seem critical, Syria limits not only the news reports coming out of the country but also a lot of other communications, including blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts as well through a firewall technology much like those found in China.  Syria is a country on watch, and much more observation will happen over the coming months until Assad's regime steps down.

Full Article: Jerusalem Post

[INSPRIED_6] Video Games and International Humanitarian Law

I am somewhat mad about this article, so, I'm going to be harsh about it.  Why is the Red Cross spending time at their meetings discussing whether or not video games are representing the right things concerning international humanitarian law and war?  I thought they should be more interested in looking at themselves first, as to why they lack the ability or political knowledge to use social media outlets to expand their operations, rather than ignoring that such outlets exist.  The Red Cross is more interested in the 600 million online gamers who may/may not have committed crimes against humanity in video games.  I have a news flash for the Red Cross... "They're called video GAMES.  If these were supposed to be as real as you think they are, then they should just call them SIMULATIONS or even TRAINING."  You're arguments are just as invalid as those saying that video games like Grand Theft Auto cause kids to grow up as violent monsters.  That argument was so 10 years ago, so please focus your time, or obvious waste of it, on something else.

You want to teach online gamers the rules of international humanitarian law, or as you say, "maybe you shouldn't tie up [that hostage]" or "...it wouldn't hurt to teach online players the rules of humane conflict."  Should we just go ahead and make a video game where politicians argue one another for points?  Wait I have a better idea.  Let's make a game where you get to watch grass grow.  Seriously, video games aren't real depictions of things that happen in the real world and doing things like this make video games more and more boring.  When I go to play Modern Warfare 3, or better yet, Battlefield 3, I am going online to shoot my enemies, blow up some tanks, shoot down a fighter jet, and get some points on the side trolling the noobs.  In my personal experience, Battlefield 3 has been the more realistic game, and it even has friendly fire, which can happen, but you frown upon, praising Modern Warfare for turning reality off.  Playing video games is fun and takes up every waking minute of my free time, almost.

Stay out of my video games.  I know it's not realistic, and even a 12 year old can tell you the same thing.  Come on Red Cross, you have operations going on all around the world, and you're holding meetings on something like this?  I'm embarrassed for you.

I recall that sometime right after Modern Warfare 2 came out, The Onion went and made a post about a realistic, "true to life" game.  I sure can't imagine anyone actually playing this game.  It won't even be as popular as Street Cleaner Simulator.

Full Article: Popular Science

[INSPRIED_5] India, how could this happen?

The title of this article grabbed my attention, one because when over 90 people die in a hospital, it sounds much more like an epidemic, but the situation is easily just as horrifying.  Over 90 people died as a fire broke out in the hospital, and much of the confusion, and lack of action can be directly attributed to ineptitude and idiocy of hospital workers.  How something like this could have happened, we might never know, but certainly an investigation will go on to find a reason why hospital workers ran as bodies burned in their beds.

In some of India's wealthiest areas lie hospitals that have some of the world's most revolutionary technology.  Cancer centers are gifted with radiation therapy tools and high-level trauma units just to be sure any patient that comes and visits their hospital, there would be a promise to every patient that they would get the best care in India.

It's too bad that plain human idiocy killed over 90 of these people.  Just as a simple synopsis of the story, a fire broke out within the facility.  Since hospitals are typically air locked to prevent diseases and bad air quality from entering the facility, the smoke from the fire spread to all the other rooms in the facility.  This continued as the fire ravaged through nearly a hundred rooms in the building.  People outside the building could see the flames jumping from the windows, and when they tried to enter the building to perform some rescue, security guards pushed them back and told them not to worry about a "little kitchen fire."  As the crowds pushed, hospital workers fled, running as far as they could away from the fire, leaving hundreds stranded in the building unable to leave their beds.

The fire suppressant system and the fire detection systems both failed to work, turning this problem into an outright catastrophe.  It wasn't for quite some time that they finally started letting people leave the hospital, and once the smoke cleared out, there were bodies found all over the building.

Why would the hospital workers flee the fire and totally forget about everyone else in the building?  Why did security guards just push people back when they could've walked outside to see flames coming from the windows?  So far, 6 people are charged with culpable homicide, but I don't think that's enough.  Every worker who fled without helping someone out of the building should be held responsible for all the deaths.  Also, what about the fire alarm or suppression systems?  Are the same models being used in other buildings?  How can they be sure to fix those systems so that more innocent people don't die?

This terrible catastrophe is just flat out sad.  People died who didn't need to.

Full Article: NY Times

[INSPIRED_4] “Wasting” 10 Seconds to Change the World - reCaptcha

In one of my news feeds today, there were some references to the Captcha program.  It turns out, that the Captcha program, that’s used on hundreds and thousands of websites every day, has been redeveloped by one of the creators and fully expanded for all new uses, rather than security and wasting everyone’s time.  Although reCaptcha isn’t anything new, some of its achievements have been fantastic.  Looking back all those years ago Captcha has been around, Luis von Ahn brought some history to light that impressed me.

von Ahn was one of the original creators of Captcha at Carnegie Mellon.  Captcha was just a way of authenticating users online, especially when they make profiles and online accounts on websites and online services.  Captcha provides a base layer of security to filter out bots and spambots from the system entries and basically “wastes 10 seconds of your time,” according to von Ahn.  As many companies and individuals have said, time is money.  For researchers like von Ahn, wasted time is more costly than wasted money, because we, as humans, have capacity and lots of potential.  Hence, the reCaptcha program came about.  Through the reCaptcha system, when users authenticate their actions online, they are not only making their actions safer, but one of the two words has been scanned out of a book and is in need of interpretation, because computers cannot read scanned text very well.  This whole process, by using user input for recognizing words, is all about digitizing millions of books from the library to the web.  This project helps train computers and helps utilize the 10 seconds of wasted time and change it into 10 seconds well spent.  The project has interpreted billions of words so far today, and can fully translate 2.5 million books per year at its current rate.  Crowd-sourcing at its finest has proven that time is a rare commodity, and when acquired, can be utilized for some great projects. 

There has also been some development into Dual Lingo, which was another side project by von Ahn.  This project utilizes a reCaptcha like program to help people learn words, phrases, and comprehension in other languages.  His argument for the project was that programs like Rosetta Stone, that people purchase and spends hundreds of dollars on, discriminates against people who cannot afford the expensive software, especially the poor.  This Dual Lingo project helps students learn new languages without having to break the bank.  Students learn through activities that work much the reCaptcha interpretation system, but rather the words coming from literature in American libraries, the text comes from online webpages and Wikipedia pages that are written in one language, and could be translated into other languages.  If 1 million people spent some short amount of time playing with the Dual Lingo program, they will not only learn just as well without Rosetta Stone software, but they have the capability to translate every English Wikipedia page into Spanish in just over 80 hours. 

If this kind of technology is being used right now to translate basic websites, perhaps this technology can be used to translate websites like the UN and other NGOs who are currently struggling to keep their sites up to par with all the visitors that stop by their websites.  To me, this tech can be repurposed to so many applications, bringing back the idea of crowd-sourced information processing that was somewhat used on Twitter during natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, translating Haitian Creole into other languages for aid workers.

Final Classroom Reflections

First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Tapia for creating this exciting class that really gets students involved with real world problems facing humanitarian organizations.  The class was presented with some very-well connected experts in the field of humanitarianism and opened our eyes to reality of difficulties that NGOs and the UN face on a daily basis.  All the speakers had one thing in common, which ran synonymous with the theme of the Crisis Informatics course; humanitarian organizations are doing everything they can to help people, but really aren't sure how they can efficiently utilize social media and growing technologies to enhance their abilities to save lives and cut on their operating costs.  Until technology can be integrated in a way that can guarantee the ability to save lives, these NGOs and the UN will remain skeptical about the technology everyday users interact with.

In the future, I can easily see how IST and SRA students will be working directly with individuals in the humanitarian assistance community.  Many IST and SRA students have ideas to contribute to advisers to see if they can be implemented.  These same students can also help looking into the current issues with why technology isn't as imperative to people like those at the UN and other NGOs.  The advantage to IST and SRA students is that our curriculum is based off real world situations and experiences over a broad range of topics, whether they are more technical in nature or more people oriented, focusing on cultural impacts and societal change with technological means.  Overall, this means that when we graduate, we are prepared for any kind of industry and any kind of situation.  Our students adjust to different environments and carry on using their technical and people skills to make a difference.

For example, this Crisis Informatics course helped orient both IST and SRA students to ways of taking our technical, analytical skills to observe and analyze disasters that have occurred in the past couple of years to see how technology played a role, and what kinds of information came about from victims, rescue workers, and outsiders altogether.  IST students had the chance to take a couple database and computer language courses, which would help them comprehend the amount of data that comes out of an emergency, let alone a disaster with catastrophic results.  They would see how a database would need to be organized to handle text messages or how to modify some files to work with the right API to intercept thousands and thousands of tweets for categorization.  SRA students have some experience with securing such systems so the information remains either anonymous or locked down to only allow access to certain individuals, but SRA students also have other skills.  SRA students also gain plenty of experience facing risks and making decisions that affect both short-term and long-term processes or objectives.  They can forecast and predict different scenarios if a particular decision was made compared to another.  Overall, whether the student is an SRA major or an IST major, they will be specially prepared to both innovate and analyze problems around the world and with continue to work to find answers and solutions to those problems.

I really hope that sometime soon, organizations like the UN, the Red Cross, and countless other organizations will look towards the ways technology can be used to help their efforts.  People around the world continue to contribute to open source projects that could provide serious boosts to the rising demands of technology globally.  Students in the College of IST have huge potential, and are ready to do what they can to improve technology around the world.