Tech ideas to save lives
Enter global competition to find best use for new tech in future natural disasters
RPI students brainstorm for future disaster responses.
During a natural disaster, like the flooding now hitting the Carolinas from Hurricane Florence, the Twitter messages from people desperate for rescue, medical care or other help could turn into an incomprehensible blizzard.
What if there was a way to sort it all out — quickly, using high-powered computer learning — so emergency officials could target the most critical situations first?
That idea was among dozens of potential solutions to disaster response that emerged Saturday at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where about 150 students around tables on a basketball court were part of a global competition named “Call for Code.”
The Twitter-sorting idea was being worked by a four-man team, including Bryan Diendonne, of Delray Beach, Fla.; Olivier Poulin, of Montreal; Adrian Collado, of Wells, Hamilton County; and Scott Thiel, of Fairfax, Va.
Their idea, said Collado, relies on writing a program to review Twitter messages, and sort out those that relate to specific needs, and then have the program engage in a form of “machine learning” to sort and distill all the information into a database that emergency officials could use to direct help where it is most needed.
It would be much, much quicker than having harried emergency staffers try to read and digest hundreds, or even thousands of Twitter messages that might erupt in the aftermath of a disaster, Collado said.
The two-day RPI event was one of 15 happening around the globe, from Syracuse University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Germany and India, said Angel Diaz, vice president of developer technology at IBM, one of the sponsors of the competition, which carries a $200,000 grand prize for the best idea.
Other sponsors include the United Nations, the Red Cross, dozens of private companies, and several celebrities, including Ellen Degeneres.
Since the contest started in June, more than 100,000 people have taken part across more than 300 events, Diaz said. The last such events are set for Sept. 28, after which all ideas will be judged.
He said one such idea, generated at an earlier event in Puerto Rico, was to create a system of distinctive icons that could be placed by people across widely dispersed disaster areas, with each icon representing a specific need, such as food, water or medical care. A video-equipped drone would be able to f ly over the area, tracking and compiling the various icons, which would then help guide disaster officials on what supplies to send where.
The creators of the winning idea will also get to pitch to an established venture capital firm, which means it could actually go into production, Diaz added.
The RPI event was one of 15 happening around the globe, said Angel Diaz, vice president of developer technology at IBM, one of the sponsors of the competition, which carries a $200,000 grand prize for the best idea.