IRC Seminar, presented by Prof Terrance Fernando: "Multi-agency Collaboration Platform for Supporting Disaster Risk Reduction"

Abstract

THINKlab is a technology innovation centre designed to conduct interdisciplinary to conduct challenges faced by industry, cities and communities. Over the last 15 years, THINKlab has been conducting research to develop collaborative platform for sectors such as aerospace, automotive, space and built environments that exploit the power of communication technology, data modelling, advanced visualization, VR, data analytics, simulation etc. Recently, THINKlab has been successful in winning three GCRF funded projects (MOBILISE, TRANSCEND and Unite4Resilience) to strengthen the digital infrastructure of low-middle income countries such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Malaysia to better prepare and respond to natural disasters and build community resilience for climate change. This talk will present the technology platforms that have been developed by the THINKlab team as a part of these projects. Specifically, it will present a range of technology platforms that have been developed for supporting various stages of the disaster management cycle and the challenges in implementing them within a multi-agency context in the chosen low-middle income countries.

Short Bio on presenter: Professor Terrence Fernando is the Director of the THINKlab (www.salford.ac.uk/thinklab) at the University of Salford. Professor Fernando is specialised in distributed visualisation and simulation systems for team collaboration and has a broad background in conducting multi-disciplinary research programmes involving a large number of research teams in areas such as disaster management, distributed virtual engineering, virtual building construction, driving simulations, space exploration, virtual prototyping, urban simulation, and maintenance simulation.