Research Interests 

Major definite purpose of my research career is to reduce the chaos during the emergency situations. While my education up to masters degree  followed by the professional research experience laid foundation for understanding of various environmental challenges, the current PhD program at DA-IICT, involves the coursework that provides  the familiarity with basic  tools and techniques in Information and communication technology (ICT) to "deal"  with these challenges. Hence, my current research is amalgamation of technologies of multiple disciplines. Following is the brief account of my research interest in  individual building blocks

Disaster Management
With increased vulnerability, costs and multitudes of effects of disasters, Disaster Management has become mandatory for any organization. While this process is becoming more refined, the recent experiences suggest lots of issues remains to be unsolved. The co-ordination between the respondents and victims is causing challenges due to adverse impact of disasters. Management of Resources, Co-ordination, Communication, Collaborative Decision Making, Emergency Alerts, Command and Control remains to be difficult as disasters crosses the administrative boundaries.

 

The amount of coherence required to realize  these objectives is a crucial challenge for the authorities. Even with the availability of standards based technologies, required commitment and resources, the situation have not benefited much. There is a need for  multi-disciplinary investigation to find out ways that answers the issues:

  • How agencies should identify information need ?
  • How to support and sustain  information flow among various actors ?
  • How agencies should collect, store and publish multi-dimensional information ?

more on Disaster Management issues, publications, people, projects, technology,  links

 

Geo- Spatial Information Systems
GIS is one of the most important technology being extensively deployed by almost any type of organizations for managing their activities spanned in spatial dimension. GIS based  Analysis and Visualization provides grater decision making capability  by enabling detection of  spatial and temporal  changes in the database. The data being utilized  can be created, maintained and distributed by diverse organizations for various purposes. This introduces the challenge of interoperability of amongst the spatial database. 

 

Interoperability is  extensively being  addressed by research, business  and administrative community for more than a decade. As a result of these  efforts, real time dissemination of spatial data across organization is increasingly being adopted by organizations. This covers only a fraction of the information being required in responding disasters. With changing local conditions, culture  and many other parameters, processing of the raw data  and its conversion  to usable information is still a difficult challenge. As a result of this,  a vast amount of critical  information remains unavailable to the respondents thereby increasing the chaos in response work. The following open issues needs to be resolved to bridge the gap:

  • How to setup spatial data infrastructure that supports "situation awareness"?
  • Which  spatial data model should be adopted  by the agencies?
  • How minute details can be incorporated to geo-spatial databases?
  • How to provide support for rendering maps based on multiple themes?
  • How space, time and event dimensions can be incorporated for information dissemination?

more on GIS issues, publications, people, projects, technology,  links

 

Grid Computing

Grid Computing has emerged as an important alternative for organizations planning to manage vast amount of critical data and systems that supports collection, processing and handling that data. Data and compute grid is successfully  established for supporting many scientific experimentations as well. Considering the information requirement for Disaster Management, Grid Computing turns out to be a legitimate choice. Yet setting-up a grid infrastructure during emergency requires consideration of following issues:

  • How agencies can enable evolution of  a Grid Infrastructure that support their information needs?
  • How agencies can be enabled to dynamically manage grid resources among peers and hierarchical systems? 

more on Grid Computing issues, publications, people, projects, technology,  links

 
Eventing 

An important requirement  of Disaster Management Information System is to provide accurate, timely and useful information to the respondents and targeted audience. A single situation, action or development may have different implication for different individuals based on their role, interest or association with that event. Hence it is mandatory for an agency to effectively detect event, identify the receiver(s), create the message(s)  and notify using appropriate communication channel. With dynamically changing conditions and situations it is difficult challenge for an agency to establish a event-notification system.

more on Eventing  issues, publications, people, projects, technology,  links

 Events 

 

 

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