Sahana Research & Action develops innovative, impact-based tools and implements cost effective solutions addressing disaster and humanitarian management challenges throughout the world. We use free and open source technologies as well as agile, iterative design approaches to turn insights and feedback generated by Sahana's community of software developers and disaster management professionals into useful, usable and economical tools for disaster risk reduction and disaster resource management.

Projects

Interplanetary Alert Network (IAN)

Alert aggregation without authentication going beyond national alerting authorities to include all manner of alerts including those received from Chains of IOTs.

Research

• Work and research extends from GRAB.
• Modeled alerting/warning using the Hyperledger block chain technology. Then realized that Interplanetary File System and a presentation layer of classified alerts would suffice.
  • Presentation layer is investigating NLP classification techniques, such as the use of Colab's Tensor Flows and Embedding for classifying CAP messages received into GRAB.
  • Next extend the classification to other non-structured or semi-structured data feeds

Sahana First Response

Simple solution for Incident management, ideal  for Emergency Operations Centers.

Research:

• A prototype was developed based on the team's experience and exposure to first response [Dec. 2017].

Implementations:

• Seychelles Department of Risk and Disaster Management  training and implementation, funded by the African Development Community [Sep. 2018 - Aug. 2019]

Globally Relayed Alerts and Bulletins (GRAB)

GRAB evolves from the Global CAP data feeds and it enhances SAMBRO to aggregate various Atom/RSS, Twitter, and Facebook alerts of interest.

Research:

• Analyzing the feeds and data to determining the optimal parser and filters for indexing the data in the Sahana CAP and CMS tables. Periodically test the data to determine the reliability; especially in the CAP feeds. Findings were shared at the 2018 CAP Implementation Workshop Filtered Alerthub side event [Jan. 2018 - Jun. 2018].

Mobile Pictographs for Disaster Communication

Imagery for communicating disaster-related messages to the linguistically challenged (Concept).

Research:

• Pictographs in Disaster Information Communication for the Linguistically Challenged is a core-recognition project, funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund of UK, carried out in partnership with Microsoft Research India, ExCiteS Lab of the University College London, and the Industrial Design Center of the Indian Institute of Technology - Bombay. [July 2016 - July 2017]

Sahana Alert and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO)

Risk-based warning and situation-awareness system build using the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) international standard.

Research:

• Making use of the Global CAP Data feeds to find trends and other probabilistic events of interest in the data streams for informing climate change and disaster planning.
• Interactive Voice Response integration with Sahana CAP-enabled warning and SITREP-enabled incident reporting (funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund and the Kubatana Trust of Zimbabwe) [October 2011 - June 2012]
• Sahana CAP-enabled alerting module to complement a Real-Time Biosurveillance Program in India and Sri Lanka (funded by IDRC) [June 2008 - December 2010]
• Use of CAP and five wireless ICTs, in the HazInfo project, for bridging the last-mile and to pilot test Multi-language Multi-media warning in Sri Lanka (funded by IDRC) [December 2005 - March 2008]

Implementations:

• "CAP on a Map" project, to improve coastal resilience through a cross-agency situatioanal-awareness platform in Myanmar, Philippines, and Maldives (funded by UNESCAP) [January 2015 - October 2016]
• ITU CAP Software and Training Module for the International Telecommunication Union Asia Pacific Regional Office to use in promoting the ITU-T X.1303 Common Alerting Protocol warning standard among member States (funded by ITU Bangkok Project Office). [April 2014 - July 2014]

Additional Areas of Interest

• Humanitarian information exchange standards evaluation, advocacy and implementation (list of Sahana interop adoption)
• Communities of Practice Investigates the use of Technology Stewardship and Communities of Practice approach to fostering acceptable and sustainable National Sahana deployments.
• Damage and Loss assessment using alternative and unconventional data streams
• Knowledge Mobilization using digitization, data processing, and information sharing techniques
• Live-exercises and Simulations that test Disaster ICT interoperability

Our Team

Nuwan Waidyanatha, nuwan@sahanafoundation.org, Sahana Software Foundation
Lutz Frommberger, lutz@sahanafoundation.org, Sahana Software Foundation
Contact, info@sahanafoundation.org