SAVI: EAGER: for Global Research on Applying Information Technology to Support Effective Disaster Management (GRAIT-DM)

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Disasters cause damages estimated in many billions of dollars and many lives lost every year. Disaster management is a challenging task due to the seemingly unpredictable alterations of the environment and impact on people. With the primary focus on the application of information technology and Big Data, this award establishes a "virtual institute" for Global Research on Applying Information Technology to Support Effective Disaster Management (GRAIT-DM). It will foster research collaborations and community activities, with the goal of improving our preparedness for, response to, and recovery from disasters. Led by partners at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo, the virtual institute is a U.S.-Japanese cooperative effort that should grow to become a global collaboration in the near future.Information technology has transformed modern disaster management, as demonstrated by Twitter which was a valuable information source during the Tohoku Earthquake. A Big Data-based approach to disaster management research can be both transformative and challenging, at both human and social scales. Reflecting this, the GRAIT-DM project supports the collection of large data sets from environmental sensors and information networks shared by many researchers working on various aspects of disaster management. This virtual institute promotes global research on the application of information technology by engaging the big data producers (e.g., sensor networks researchers), big data consumers (e.g., disaster management researchers), and big data managers (e.g., data analytics researchers) who connect the big data producers to consumers. Concrete activities include community-building workshops in the U.S. and Japan, outreach and publication of research reports, educational activities such as summer schools for graduate students and junior researcher exchanges, and a web portal to provide access to data and support for software tools for community use. Broader impacts include beneficial leveraging of international research and infrastructure investments, enhancement of on-going projects through cross-fertilization, an accelerated rate of innovation relevant to disaster management, and the development of a work-force with specialized talent, capable of excelling in a new, highly interconnected world that must cope with disasters.This award has been designated as a Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) award and is being co-funded by NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering.