Friday, (15/10/2021) Universitas Surabaya held the 5th webinar series event that dicussed about Information & ICT in Humanitarian Logistics and Disaster Management. The speaker was a senior lecturer from Aston Business School, Prof. Pavel Albores, MIET, FHEA. This webinar was attended by 39 participants consisting of undergraduate students/S1 (from Disaster Management and Logistics class) and graduate students/S2 of Industrial Engineering Ubaya, and students from another faculties.
In this webinar session, Prof. Pavel explained about the role of information and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in dealing with disasters. The question about “Why ICT is important?” will be the basis of discussion in this webinar. In the context of disaster, we want to minimize the risk of reccurence and the impact of disaster. Prof. Pavel also discussed about the advances in information that has given us a lot of data such as cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data analysis, visualization tools and its help assist that may improve the predictability and accuracy in decision making across the main stages of crisis and disaster management, like when we are deciding such as where to send help, how much help that we have to send, and which routes are the emergency vehicles are going to use. These information that has been processed will be used by Disaster Management System for optimization techniques to identify about what and where assistance is needed.
Prof. Pavel also gives a case study regarding the use of social media in Indonesia as a main informasion source for the public. In Indonesia, there is more than 202,6 million people connected of social media use. In this context, there is one advantage to the abundance of social media users, where the combination of social networks and mobile phones may keep the citizens informed about the status or other things related to the disaster. Besides, social media is also good for civil protection authorities for decision makers to gather information from the users.
