When the massive Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster occurred in March 2011, many people felt panic, and did not know “what should do”, "where was available toilet", “where was the available evacuation center”, etc. Since the train systems in Tokyo were stopped after the massive Tohoku earthquake, there are about 3 million people in Tokyo who had difficulty returning home. And, I was one of them, it took me 9 hours to come back home (in normal day, it took me only about 1 hour). The Japanese government said that there is 87% of chance of an approximately 8.0-magnitude earthquake occurring in the Tokai region in Japan within the next 30 years. In this case, temporary homeless in Tokyo such as people unable to return home is expected to reach to an amount of 6.5 million people.
Not only earthquake, tsunami, there are many other disasters around the world.
So, What can you do? What a computer scientist can do?
I wish someone who can continuously do the following works:
The-Minh Nguyen, Takahiro Kawamura, Yasuyuki Tahara, and Akihiko Ohsuga: Building a Time Series Action Network for Earthquake Disaster. In Proc. ICAART2012, volume 1, pp.100-108, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, 6-8 February, 2012. In Cooperation with: Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence (APPIA), Spanish Association of Artificial Intelligence (AEPIA), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). (Goal: To build a timeline action network that represents people's activities in real-time. By using this network, computers can recommend useful action patterns for people in natural disasters. See demo)
The-Minh Nguyen, Takahiro Kawamura, Yasuyuki Tahara, and Akihiko Ohsuga: Self-Supervised Capturing of Users’ Activities from Weblogs. International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems,Vol.6, No.1, pp.61-76, InderScience Publishers, 2012 (pdf). (Goal: To automatically mine human activities from weblogs/Twitter)
If( you can read Japanese ){
}else{
Contact me for more information.
}