The World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) is an initiative by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to improve humanitarian action. The Summit, which is to be held in 2016, stands to be one of the most important humanitarian conferences in a decade. One key pillar of WHS is humanitarian innovation. “Transformation through Innovation” is the WHS Working Group dedicated to transforming humanitarian action by focusing explicitly on innovation. I have the pleasure of being a member of this working group where my contribution focuses on the role of new technologies, data science and advanced computing. As such, I’m working on an applied study to explore the role of computing research institutes as an innovation pathway for humanitarian technology. The purpose of this blog post is to invite feedback on the ideas presented below.
I first realized that the humanitarian community faced a “Big Data” challenge in 2010, just months after I had joined Ushahidi as Director of Crisis Mapping, and just months after co-founding CrisisMappers: The Humanitarian Technology Network. The devastating Haiti Earthquake resulted in a massive overflow of information generated via mainstream news, social media, text messages and satellite imagery. I launched and spearheaded the Haiti Crisis Map at the time and together with hundreds of digital volunteers from all around the world went head-to head with Big Data. As noted in my forthcoming book, we realized there and then that crowdsourcing and mapping software alone were no match for Big (Crisis) Data.
This explains why I decided to join an advanced computing research institute, namely QCRI. It was clear to me after Haiti that humanitarian organizations had to partner directly with advanced computing experts to manage the new Big Data challenge in disaster response. So I “embedded” myself in an institute with leading experts in Big Data Analytics, Data Science and Social Computing. I believe that computing research institutes (CRI’s) can & must play an important role in fostering innovation in next generation humanitarian technology by partnering with humanitarian organizations on research & development (R&D).
Source: Computing Research Institutes as an Innovation Pathway for Humanitarian Technology