State of Nepal's Emergency Comms, after the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake

With the assistance of LIRNEasia, we carried out a comprehensive evaluation of Nepal's Emergency Communication; August 2015 - April 2016. The report was presented at INET-Kathmandu.

The key message that I delivered was that for any Information Technology to triumph during crises and emergencies (shown by the green pinnacle in image to the left), a sturdy foundation of ICT resilience is compulsory. Robust infrastructure is the shouldering basis for ICT resilience. Thus, roads for engineers to travel to fix ill-fated BTS and Transmissions and electricity to power the telecommunications are essential elements for keeping the ICTs alive.

The venn diagram, to the right, illustrates the elements contributing to “Resilient Emergency Communication”. Robustness requires ensuring survivabilty and availability of the telecoms; especially a Government Emergency Communications (GECO). The GECO weaknesses are complemented by a Rapid Restoration of Access to Telecommunications (RREACT) program. The two complementing elements contribute to an effective Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan (BC-DRP).

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Emergency communication over Radio Data System proposed to ISIF Asia

I put in a proposal to the 2010 Information Society Innovation Fund - on the concept of extending the information, usually easily available over the Internet, through Radio Data System (RDS) platform; specifically, communicating emergency information over RDS. It is a very small grant and the chances of getting selected are very slim (i.e. chance of 1 out of 20).

SMS Transport for GSoC 2009

It is my first time volunteering to mentor students for the Google Summer of Code 2009. The Sahana Free and Open Source Software community has been taking part in GSoC since 2007. This year Google has offered 10 slots to begin with; meaning 10 student will be provided summer funding to develop code for Sahana. There were 34 applicants with project ideas for Sahana.

One of my initial ideas had been to develop a SMS transport that mimics IP where data can be exchanged between a mobile client and a server (database). This is to address the problem faced by emergency coordinators in communicating field data to central levels and receiving information during the response stage of a crisis. Network congestion is a fact during the peak or initial stages of a crisis. Hence, voice channels are the first to shut down. Other means such as GPRS signals are not always up to par and in most cases would be weak in covering remote location that are in the periphery of the footprint of cellular towers. However, SMS that works on weak signal strength, a store-and-forward communication technology, even though may not send the information in real time, would eventually get the data across to the terminal devices.

Presently Sahana, a web browser application, reliant on Internet connectivity for data exchange, is developing a class of mobile phone and personal data assistant hand-held device applications to operate in the field. These hand-held devices are handy effective tools in data collection and reception. Although GPRS exists as means for providing connectivity, given the question on reliability, it is important that a redundant or alternate channel for transferring information is in place, if Sahana applications are to be effective across available communication network platforms.

The problem that this project promises to solve is to develop an SMS transport layer that can communicate with the Sahana applications during times of need. This proposal outlines the goals and design of the envisaged software object that will work as a general protocol to support all Sahana modules for networking with hand-held terminal device applications.

The Sahana community has definitely selected the student who has provided some original ideas and proven skills to develop the client and server side components. Some aspects that the developer must keep in mind are compressing the strings to minimze on SMS tariffs are multifold relative to GPRS, sequencing the SMS pages to ensure they are chained back at both server and client sides. Some thoughts such as use of binary XML has been suggested to structure the server calls or client requests and data exchange between the Sahana clients and Sahana servers.

I'm excited to mentor the student in developing this component as part of GSoC2009 for Sahana.

Real-time biosurveillance research is off the ground

The long awaited real-time biosurveillance program pilot project officially began on 11-July-2008. LIRNEasia received a grant from the International Development Research Center to conduct the developmental research project over the next 2 years. I will be working in the capacity of the Project Director.

The first year will be spent on developing the ICT system for disease surveillance and notification. Data will be collected through a J2ME mobile phone application, which would be a direct adoption of the java rosa (a.k.a openROSA) suite of applications or a rendition of it. The analytics algorithms with GUI for detection of disease outbreaks will come from Auton Lab. Very well use Sahana Messaging or SMS Geo-Chats for a feedback/follow-up mechanism with a log for sending and keeping track of alerts.

Second year will be devoted to evaluating the ICT system in a real world setting where the government and community health care workers will use the system as part of their daily routines. A prominent question will be determining the incentives for health care workers in rural settings to participate in a e-Health based programs. We will look at the productivity increase, which will be weighted against a control group who is not exposed to the e-Health based disease surveillance and notification program. Justify issues related some prior studies that have shown effects of manipulation of data - under-reporting or over-reporting - depending on the circumstance. Evaluate the effectiveness of biosurveillance algorithms in detecting disease outbreaks and understanding whether mobile application based data streams can assist in the detection and notification process; as well as the different aspects between the different sides (data collectors, algorithm designers, algorithm implementers, health monitors, program evaluators, etc) in the overall picture.

Some of the initiatives in the same disease surveillance and notification space are the following projects -- Google Predict & Prevent, InSTEDD, Sahana, D-Tree, Dimagi, GATHER, among many others.

About Spot On Solutions

Order is fundamental to the process of measurement: representing objects by numbers presuppose we can arrange them in order - Peter J. Cameron

Spot on Solutions (Private) Limited (abbreviated as Spot-on) is a company incorporated under the Government of Sri Lanka Department of Registration of Companies Act no 17. Spot-on work initiated in April 2005 out of my home in Mount Lavinia. A lab was setup on December of 2005 in the Amsler building at No 25 Rotunda Gardens, Colombo 03 with 3 software engineers and myself doing the work. The lab was later shifted to 42 Deseram road, Mount Lavinia in March of 2006 and continued to function there for 14 months until May 2007. Now Spot On functions on the basis of a virtual organization working out of Kunming, China.

Spot-on aims to provide affordable technology solutions for progressive enterprises. Today's world requires organizations to be at the top of their game. Planning is one of the most vital aspects in keeping cost and wasted resources down.

The first work of Spot-on was developing an innovative optimization tool for the purpose services planning; hence the acronym SPOT - Service Plan Optimization Tool, which was absorbed in to the company's name. Moreover, planning solutions must be precisely on-the-dot, i.e. Spot-on: an age old Sinhales (Sri Lankan language) phrase insinuating the same - "thi-tha-ta we-de".

Spot-on has now diversified in to the arena of Information Communication Technology (ICT) with an aim of designing affordable ICT solutions, pilot testing the solutions, and conducting operations research analysis on the pilot system in collaboration with national and international partners for the purpose of public sector ICT policy research.