Smart Sensations: Exploring Spatial-Temporal Relationships between Environmental and Human DynamicsGünther Sagl Today, a huge number of all kinds of digital sensors, such as traditional weather stations, sensors embedded in mobile phones (as well as the mobile phone as such) etc., share their sensations via ubiquitous communication networks like the internet. This strongly facilitates the vision of an 'electronic skin of planet earth' (Neil Gross, 1999). Pervasive “sensor” networks – in their broadest sense – provide even real-time observations of both physical and social phenomena. Such sensations provide digital reflections of the current state of the environment as well as individual and collective human activity. While environmental monitoring technologies and methods has been established and improved over the last decades, large-scale sensing of social phenomena has become possible just recently. This is mainly due to the rapid development of mobile communication technologies, and web 2.0 platforms (e.g. flickr, twitter). Physically measurable environmental phenomena like precipitation, gas concentrations, radioactive radiation, seismic activity etc. can be monitored through intelligent geosensor webs. Further “on-the-fly” processing and spatial-temporal analyses of sensor measurements are increasingly performed in cloud computing environments in a service-oriented manner. Human behavioral patterns however are rather sensed indirectly: for instance, usergenerated traffic in mobile communication networks – which in fact can be seen as a large-scale sensor – can serve as proxy for collective human behavior; or individual information voluntarily published on facebook, twitter, flickr or similar web 2.0 platforms. The gigantic volumes of such live “sensor” data and their increasing accessibility through standardized web services or open application programming interfaces lead to an enormous potential for a variety of research topics: for instance, large-scale pervasive geosensing, fine-grained spatial-temporal modeling, enhanced complex process understanding, time-critical geospatial decision support, disaster risk management etc. This research focuses on the evaluation of causal relationships between environmental dynamics and human behavioral patterns by utilizing near real-time geosensing technologies. Of particular interest is the potential impact of extreme environmental conditions and geohazards on collective human behavior in order to support time-critical pro-active decision making: for instance, rapid changes of selected environmental parameters in coincidence with anomalies in collective human behavioral patterns may trigger emergency or disaster response activities. This particular conference will provide inspiring insights into state-of-the-art disaster risk management and the big picture of understanding extreme geohazards. It surely broadens my horizon in the context of the ongoing PhD research, especially regarding data and information needed to enhance disaster risk management. |
