Last week (14-16th November, 2016), Nuwan and myself had the privileges of attending and presenting our paper entitled “Intricacies of Implementing an ITU-T X.1303 Cross-Agency Situational-Awareness Platform in Maldives, Myanmar and the Philippines” during The 8th ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference in Bangkok, Thailand. The ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conferences are organized by ITU-T and are technically co-sponsored by IEEE ComSoc. The academic was first organized in Geneva, Switzerland and the next is scheduled in Busan, South Korea. This year’s theme for the 8th conference was ICTs for a Sustainable World. This year the Academic Conference was co-organised with the Telecom event.
Our paper was awarded for the Best Paper by the committee. I was also recognized with Young Author Award.
We developed SAMBRO (Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker), the Location Based Early Warning Platform to bring all the Governmental Alerting Authority chain/hierarchy at different Administrative Division (state, province, district, zones, etc.) of the country under a co
mmon umbrella. SAMBRO is Common Alerting Protocol Version (CAP) 1.2 enabled system. The CAP is advocated by ITU and supported by World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). The SAMBRO was developed and customized under the “CAP-on-a-MAP” Project, which is funded by The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) especially the Tsunami Trust Fund and implemented by the Government of Philippines, Maldives and Myanmar. The CAP Alert RSS Feeds from Myanmar and Philippines are subscribed by other platforms developed by IFRC Apps and Google Public Feeds and distributed through their system. Under CAP-on-a-MAP, we developed both mobile (Android and IoS) and the web-based platform.
Our Paper on SAMBRO supported the UN Sustainable Global Goals Goals 1, 11 and 13 namely “End poverty in all its forms everywhere“, “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” and “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” respectively.
In the paper, we discussed the potential of implementing CAP for the disaster management, all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings activities. We discussed about different techniques and methodology we used to introduce the concept of CAP among the experts working with the National Disaster Alerting Authority. These experts are involved with the public alerting activity and understand its significance and importance but has not been unmasked with the data standard. We follow the Agile and Scrum development methodology for engaging the experts from the very beginning in the design, development, testing, simulations and drills. The platform is a result of iterative process of silent tests, tabletop exercises, discussions and development. However, since CAP is still in development and OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee has released Version 1.2, we did encounter some of the issues. During the Global CAP Implementation Workshop 2016 in Asian Institute of Technology, we also mentioned about the challenges in implementing CAP, along with some confusion on the attributes, its shortcoming and provide suggestions by citing example of how we are implementing that in SAMBRO. There were discussions around this area during the CAP Implementation workshop as well. We expect to see new version with some of these issues addressed. In paper, we then go on discussing some of the implementation issues like difficulty in acquiring the SMS Gateway, CAP implementation strategies, sufficient stakeholder/organisation interactions etc. The paper is concluded by providing some suggestions as well as recommendations for the future alike work.
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Virtual Reality (VR), Big Data, 5G – 5th Generation Network were the most discussed and the hot cake of the conference. In fact, most of the keynote speech as well as special sessions were on the topics like Jules Verne’s ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE: FRIENDLY COMPANION OR THREATENING CONQUEROR? and Thomas Wiegand, Executive Director, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute; Chair, Image Communication, TU Berlin talked about The convergence on Communication and Machine Learning where he discussed about use of Machine Learning for the Communication and Video Coding Standards.
Among many, Simon Tuff from BBC talked about how BBC has been broadcasting using the environmentally sustainable technique. He explained about how energy are wasted in the broadcasting studio and increased carbon emission. Another paper discussed about the mobile signal penetration to help fisherman for advanced information on the speed, directions, swells and wave height providing Early Warning. The team developed Java Based Android Mobile App for notifying, which can support multiple language.
A Japan-based paper presented by Kotaro Suzuki, discussed about the implementation of ICT-enabled with video calling facility for the regular health monitoring. The transformation in terms of hospital care to home care. Suzuki mentioned about two major features to help the patient. First, he mentioned about the use of Microsoft KINECT to measure strain of the upper body to see the progress of rehabilitation. Second, the use of video call center to help guide the patients through the therapy. This was quite an interesting perspective on the use of ICT for health facility. Another paper, which won the Second Best Paper discussed about the Authenticated Caller ID to avoid the fraud complaints and fraud monetary loss.
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