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.

[INSPIRED_3] Updates from Around the World

One thing I like to do in my free time is check out what kinds of things are happening around the world.  In particular, I spent some time today looking through events that have unfolded in particular areas around the globe since their times of crisis.  People only tend to pay attention to events for 2 to 3 weeks, or however CNN covers a story before it becomes “boring” to talk about.  To relieve such feelings, lets take a look back in places that haven’t been in the news recently, and see how things have changed since the hardship.

Somalia

The overall state of Somalia has majorly deteriorated.  Throughout the social conflict between extremist forces and “government” forces, humanitarian aid has been difficult to produce for the millions of people affected by the famine.  Even for those who have been helped, many don’t want to return to their homes.  The Ethiopian government recently decided that they needed to step in to control the current state of its neighbor to prevent future conflict between the two nations.  This is in addition to the Kenyan troops which moved into the failed state back in October.  Ethiopian and Kenyan troops are now stationed in Mogadishu to be sure humanitarian aid workers are protected enough to provide food, water, and medical care to the troves of people migrating to the cities, away from conflict zones.  People are hoping the next rainy season will bring enough water to help crop growth, bringing more food for people come February, but with the recent droughts, future events remain uncertain.

Japan

It’s been over 8 months since an earthquake devastated northern Japan.  The nuclear fallout from the power plant meltdown has continued as a dangerous threat to the region.  Now that Japan has had some time to plan out future development plans, political boundaries are emerging as politicians argue about how to spend the money that was set aside for rebuilding areas damaged by the earthquakes and tsunami.  Most transportation grids have been repaired, and many homes have been rebuilt, but anything within 100 miles of the power plants remains dangerous.  Smaller earthquakes continue to rattle the northern section of Japan, scaring some residents scarred by the events those 8 months ago.  Traces of radioactive cesium have been identified at many food processing plants and any foods with above-normal levels are removed from processing to prevent contamination outside the danger zones.  Due to the rising costs to repair that section of the country, there has been rumors that a “disaster tax” will be imposed on citizens during the next fiscal year.

Thailand

One country really feeling some pain right now is Thailand.  The country is currently facing massive flash floods during this unusual monsoon season.  Many risk-prone areas have fallen deep underwater as flood waters rise at abnormal rates.  Many public health officials are faced with taking care of the thousands of people experiencing diseases floating around the waters while emergency workers try to save anyone they can from flooded homes.  Thailand is a large supplier to the United States of hard drives for computers.  Over the past 3 months, the price of computer hard drives world-wide has jumped nearly 50% as the manufacturing plants need to shut down all across Thailand.  Groups of people organized quickly to make sandbags to hold back all the water, but with the countless feet of rain that have fallen in the many regions, preventative efforts continue to be strained.

Pakistan

Pakistan has also received its fair share of rain and unusual weather recently.  This is the second year in a row that torrential rains came and disrupted the lives of millions of people.  Things like safe-drinking water, food, and shelter have become hard to find in the country.  The United Nations has participated in many ways to provide for the people, but the large area that has been affected is hard to take care of all at once.  As some news sources have noted, this is the worst rain they’ve had since the 1930s, and most people are doing what they can to stay alive.  The UN continues to provide for people as they can with the limited permissions set by the Pakistani government.  Conflict in some regions of the country have limited the action that aid workers can perform due to safety issues.

[INSPIRED_2] David Letterman and Bettina Luescher

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.  I enjoyed a lovely day with my family, watched some football, and continued watching some late night TV shows as I struggle through a cold.  Something was different today though... All that turkey at dinner didn’t really give me any kind of sleepiness.  I seemed to have conquered the so-called “Turkey Coma.”

Anyway, tonight I watched a two-week old taping of Letterman.  I got a couple good laughs from some of the guests and the rather corny jokes.  My interest peaked when Ms. Bettina Luescher came onto the show.  Her name sounded familiar, so a quick Google search yielded that she was a spokesman for the World Food Program.  I wondered what she would talk about, and took some notes, since I had my laptop with me anyway.  Some things she mentioned surprised me, while others were more repetitive to some things that were discussed in my Crisis Informatics class.  Allow me to elaborate.

Ms. Luescher started out with a simple introduction.  The UN’s World Food Program has been in operation for 50 years now, which is a fantastic achievement.  She made a big point that the Food Program isn’t political, but I wondered how long it took them to discuss plans of operation for disasters and famines, since that process is absolutely political.  Overall, they don’t discriminate against where they go to help, they will go anywhere in the world to help people.  An interesting fact I learned was that women are the most vulnerable.  Especially in 3rd world countries and other undeveloped countries, it is common that women are the caretakers for the family.  They take care of their children and do what they can for their husbands.  This makes women THE key to fighting hunger.  That just blew my mind (my sleep depraved mind).

An obvious question of many people, that Dave was kind enough to ask, was whether or not the world has enough food to care for every hungry person in the world, and the fact is absolutely.  The problem is that it costs money to feed people, and there isn’t enough money in the programs that feed the hungry.  The UN needs $250 million dollars to feed the number of people in the world who are hungry right now.  And even with countries making their contributions, there is still a big gap that needs to be filled.

You can text (SMS) the word AID to 27722 to donate $10 to the World Food Program.

Ms. Luescher then started fielding questions from Dave, and I found that the questions were actually some things that I’ve talked to with some of the visitors we’ve had in class.  Dave asked about the Horn of Africa, especially Somalia, and how things were going out there.  Ms. Luescher talked about how people in the Horn of Africa have been taking on huge migrations just to find food and safe water.  Then Dave made a point concerning one fact that came out of the newspapers:

“... in 90 days, 29,000 children under the age of 6, died of starvation, just in Somalia.”

Dave was completely astonished by this fact, and it really is unfathomable for all the children and families out in the Horn of Africa who are dying even as I write this blog post.  According to Ms. Luescher, the United States government is one of the biggest donors to the program, and they’re doing their best for the UN.

Somalia really has become the worst case scenario for relief organizations.  The UN has limited action in Somalia as of 2010 because of the 14 relief workers who were killed during the conflicts between extremist militants and government forces.  This limits actions in the Horn of Africa to local NGOs that have stronger ties to the local communities.

Overall, when the drought comes, people don’t have anything to fall back on, especially in these poorer nations.

The United Nations needs money for the World Food Program.  You can do your part by texting AID to 27722 to donate $10.  Ten dollars which could feed a person in Somalia for 3 weeks.

[INSPIRED] Tracking the FootPath

Tonight, I’m spending some time recovering from a head cold, watching videos of undercover cops at OWS, reading articles about what’s going on in Egypt, and listening to some music on my cell phone.  It hits me... our cell phones have so much technology jammed into the little plastic covers that we cannot even begin to explain all the bells and whistles.  But even more than the cell phones themselves, is the fact that these devices constantly send and receive signals, regardless if a call is being placed or online content is queried.  Our cell phones need to communicate with the nearest cell towers to show us how many “bars” of signal we have.  Can’t something like this be tracked?  I did some digging and found a technology that has been around for a couple years now, specifically to track you as you move around a shopping mall.

This technology is known as FootPath, brought to you by Path Intelligence.  As customers move around a mall, the last thing organizers and police want to see is too many people huddling around outside stores.  Not only does it create traffic (literally), but it also proves as an open ground for pick-pockets.  Mall management wanted ways to be sure traffic flows smoothly so that these risks of being in crowds doesn’t hit their happy shoppers.  FootPath developed a technology that tracks peoples’ cell phones as it moves across a grid.  The grid consists of a couple base station receivers and a central server for an analyst.  Typically, this is used for stores to identify where shoppers go to the most within their stores and to be sure there isn’t a build up of customers in any particular store, putting them at threat for shop-lifting.  The cell phone signal is detected for each individual in the store (with a cell phone) and for all the individuals across the mall and its parking lot.

Some privacy advocates identify the threat to consumer privacy, after all, they believe it’s much like police using a GPS on your car as you drive around town, except it’s on everybody in town rather than just you.  The signal is monitored anonymously without ever providing personally identifiable information to the central server, just to please such advocates, but the security analyst in me doesn’t see any difficulty changing the system to do so in the nature that a serious threat occurs in the mall.  Overall, the technology seems to make sense, because it helps mall coordinators and shop managers optimize their space to enhance both safe traffic flow and increase sales.

Now...

What if a system like this can be deployed on a city-wide scale... say... by putting such nodes on the prime cell towers around the city?  Police or fire rescue could use this technology to locate people in natural disasters, or help move people away from a hazardous area.  I could also see a use to be sure that if a situation develops, that human stampedes don’t occur because police need to step in.  I see great potential, but who’s to say that this system isn’t already in place?  Perhaps we could use this to save lives in places like Haiti, or Japan... (oh the possibilities).

Going back to my first point, all about some of the things I've been doing with my night, I believe that people deserve a certain level of privacy, but that a balance should be made for security.  Police at OWS and armed guards in Egypt have already proved some abuses have been made.  What is stopping anybody from abusing this tracking system as a means of unnecessary control?

I am in it for the science, and for the future.  Remember to analyze, act, and adapt as the world changes, because anything can happen in the future.

Ninja Edit:
Looks like Canada has some explaining to do... Spying on their own citizens in the name of public safety and to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars.

[Replace week 11] What can [Thread] do for you?

On Sunday, TEDxPSU occurred over at the HUB and I was one of the students working with the TEDxPSU executive board to be sure all events worked smoothly.  My official title was Stage Technology Manager, but I wasn’t stuck to any particular job.  At 6:30 in the morning, many of the days’ speakers came in to practice with the tech teams and to run through their lines.  I got a chance to see Ian Rosenberger and his presentation.  Ian founded an NGO known as Thread International and really changed the face of Haiti by showing how trash can turn into treasure.

Ian had previously participated in the TV show, Survivor, and also participated as a producer with MTV, and worked in a couple other productions with his own company.  When the devastating earthquake hit Haiti, he went down to Port-au-Prince to do anything he could.  He tried working with the people down there and met with this one person named Tassy.  Tassy was a boy who recently developed a type of cancer in his mouth.  He didn’t have the ability to see a doctor in Haiti who could treat him.  Ian took him into his home back up in the states, and worked with people to get enough money to treat the cancer and to give him new life.  After some time in the states, Ian and Tassy went back to Haiti to discover that things were still not doing well, but that also, trash was building in places it hadn’t been before.  Haiti doesn’t have a central trash/waste disposal network, so all the supplies provided by the NGOs and the UN became piles of litter on streets and in backyards.  This is where Ian’s thinking brought him to a new plane of thought.

He pondered to himself what could be done with all the trash.  He knew of companies in the states which utilize recyclable materials to reproduce consumer products, and he got into contact with many of them.  He then worked with investors and other individuals to organize a plant right in Haiti where recycling can be done for all the trash found across the Port-au-Prince area.  This center was developed to turn plastic bottles into clothing, to convert other waste into viable products, and became a way to employ members of a poor country to help them make a wage enough to support their families.  Ian literally helped Haiti turn trash into cash.  This program he founded, is called Thread International.

Today, Thread turns low-tech waste from the poorest corners of the globe to convert them into consumer products, providing an innovative way to reduce waste, create jobs, and make cash.

Ian again finished off his presentation talking about Tessy and the first thing Tessy asked of him; can you help me?  It seems that many corners of the world rely on outer help to provide for their people.  Everyone of us have the capability to save others, whether that’s by donating our time and effort or even a couple bucks for programs like Thread.  Just imagine if you were in one of their shoes, looking to people like ourselves, asking the same question... can you help me?

Micro-Bloggin and Tons of Tweets

Last Monday's class material was one of my favorites of the semester.  Sure we get speakers and such for the class, which are also interesting, but they're basically high level people in their organizations and know for a fact that there are major problems with the NGO/UN relief community.  Current rescue methods don't keep up with new technology, and I feel that this is a major drawback for the whole humanitarian community.  When NGOs don't act in time, and when the UN would rather have a weeklong debate than sending food and water to disaster zones, people are going to do what they can do to save each other until the bigger groups show up.  Some of these grassroots developments have contributed to great things, and especially in this world of social networking, there is a HUGE potential for people to become the advanced first responders.  I like to pick Twitter out of the group because Facebook has really faded from the scene now that the majority of their users are more concerned about their privacy settings and profile creepers than they are of just being careful about what they post.  Facebook data can't be used unless you're someone's friend, hence why I like Twitter, where more people are unprotected and publicly providing information.

The one article I was fortunate to present was on "Voluntweeters" or people who used Twitter as a means of saving lives and providing support to where it was needed through logistical evaluations.  Haiti was a tough example because there was not many people adopting things like formatting, hashtags, and addressing because they were more worried about taking care of their families.  The user base who adopted the "Tweak the Tweet" or "TtT" initiative helped provide messages in a formatted fashion that was conceptually acceptable and perceivably "correct."  People would take these tweets, format them, and then send them around the world.  Some users changed the format and tried to contact rescuers and providers that lived nearby to save those who were originally tweeting.  People wanted to help, and even though they may have not been able to get to Haiti, they were able to use Twitter to properly assemble messages and cries for help to reestablish effective updates and communication with aid groups and others able to provide assistance down in Haiti.

During class we were also given the opporunity to check out the Extreme Events Lab.  For any Penn State IST or SRA students who have not checked out this room, I highly suggest doing what you can to get a tour.  The EEL, as we refer to it, is a semi-secure lab which allows researchers the ability to monitor world-wide events as they unfold in time.  This lab has been used in the past to monitor the disaster in Haiti, the earthquake in Japan, and to monitor the violent actions in Oslo, Norway.  In addition, there is a 3D screen which is used to interpret data on a new level compared to looking at just charts and graphs.  Moving through data prepares you to take additional views into data stream and when combined with sound, can really play with your senses.  It seems that the border between the left brain and right brain perception disappears when creativity of the data exercises the mind in new ways.  

Disaster in Japan and the Use of Twitter

Images via TrendsMap.com

Throughout the past couple of years, the online social networking service known as Twitter has both performed as a notification tool and a perplexing instrument for data gathering and information retrieval.  According to many authors and researchers who observed the devastating earthquake in Japan, Twitter emerged as the service that was used to both communicate messages outside the country and to gather news updates about the remaining state of Japan.  Twitter had a drastic jump in traffic as users tried to get news updates, contact friends and family, and update the rest of the world on the situation from the perspective of a remote sensor.

I agree that Twitter emerged as a huge service during the disaster as a means of communication, but I have concerns relating to how the information from the disaster was actually utilized to make decisions and to send out evacuation orders, or to coordinate with emergency aid workers.  Much like we discovered with the Ushahidi platform, gathering information and data looks like a great idea, but did anyone actually use this information?  Japan may be viewed as a technologically advanced society, but I feel they still mainly depended on phone lines, cell phone towers, and satellite links for communication.

I have heard of numerous efforts by professors and other researchers outside academia who appreciate the complexity behind interpreting thousands of tweets and digital traffic.  Project EMERSE here at Penn State offered methods involved with automated processing of Twitter data for the purposes of organizing traffic based on a combination of topologies and sorting ontologies.  Other professors and associates of the College have indicated using Twitter data to create sound.  Such sounds would indicate normal activity versus spikes in activity when new trends become popular in a short amount of time.  Both such experiments and processes are intriguing to me as first steps in the right direction to turn scattered and unorganized Twitter traffic into actionable information for emergency aid workers and large-scale decision makers.

Speaking of tools that can be used in a wide variety of ways, one article I came across in my weekly feeds included an article about how Twitter traffic can be sorted and analyzed to determine threats for government agencies and defense watchdogs.  This article, produced by the Associated Press, indicates the US Defense industry became very concerned with the types of traffic that traveled out of the "Arab Spring."  Understandably, most officers in law enforcement haven't received any kind of training to handle threats made on social networking sites, let alone understand how to identify subtle threats in language usage.  Confidence and reliability of the information just might be a problem to encounter, but actionable information can possibly be translated into actionable intelligence for their purposes.

Associated Press: Twitter for Defense

Millions of people use Twitter, but for all the people who tweet or use tweets to communicate and receive information, information has yet to be created on a level to assemble action on behalf of leaders and decision makers.  Potential exists, but wide-spread usage is hard to come by.