Tag Archive for ‘University of Alberta’ at LIRNEasia

Tag Archive for 'University of Alberta'

Call for Papers: Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?
Deadline: 05 December 2008.

A world free from 9/11s and tsunamis?

on September 12, 2008

Exactly seven years from yesterday (still today to some), early in the morning on September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial airliners en route to San Francisco and Los Angeles from Boston, Newark, and Washington, D.C. The hijackers flew two of the airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center. Another group of hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. A fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, whose ultimate target was either the United States Capitol or White House, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The rest, as we say, is history.

What 9/11 was to the West, ‘the’ tsunami was to the South. Caught unaware, more than 225,000 lives…

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Tags: Alberta, Asia, Boston, Boxing Day, Colombo, communication technologies, conventional fixed wireless telephones, Gordon Gow, hazard alert systems, India, Indonesia, International Development Research Centre, Java, LIRNEasia, Los Angeles, mobile phones, Newark, Pennsylvania, Pentagon, Peter Anderson, public network, remote alarm device, SAN FRANCISCO, satellite radio, satellite technology, Shanksville, Simon Fraser University, South Towers, Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan government, Thailand, United States Capitol, University of Alberta, Very Small Aperture Terminal, VSAT, west coast, White House, World Trade Center.

HazInfo Canadian Researcher speaks at the 1st WRECOM Conference in Rome

Nuwan Waidyanatha

on October 5, 2007

Gordon Gow, a lead researcher in the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System (LM-HWS) Pilot (HazInfo project), presented the paper titled – “Community-based Hazard Warnings in Sri Lanka: Performance of Alerting and Notification in a Last-Mile Message Relay” at the 1^st Wireless Rural and Emergency Communications (WRECOM) Conference in Rome, Italy, Oct 01-02.

One of Gordon Gow’s key contributions to the HazInfo project was the Common Alerting Protocol Profile for Sri Lanka, which was a hard case as far as integrating the multi-language scenario as it is the case in Sri Lanka. The CAP Profile for Sri Lanka was designed for disseminations in Sinhala, Tamil, and English languages. Such a complex profile of CAP was field tested in Sri Lanka’s HazInfo project. This was the first time a Multilanguage…

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Tags: Alberta, Community, European Union, Faculty of Extension, Gordon Gow, Graduate Program, Italy, Mile Message Relay, Rome, Sri Lanka, st Wireless Rural, University of Alberta, voice and data systems, Wireless ICTs.

LIRNEasia/WorldSpace to present HazInfo results at WPMC 10th International Symposium

Nuwan Waidyanatha

on September 19, 2007

The HazInfo paper titled “Last-Mile Hazard Warning in Sri Lanka: Performance of WorldSpace Satellite Radios for Emergency Alerts”, coauthored by Srinivasan Rangarajan, PhD (Senior Vice President Engineering, WorldSpace), Peter Anderson (Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University), Gordon Gow, PhD (Assistant Professor, University of Alberta), and Nuwan Waidyanatha (Project Manager, LIRNEasia) was accepted for oral/poster presentation at the Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications (WPMC) at The Birla Science and Technology Center in the heart of Jaipur, India, December 03 – 06, 2007.

WorldSpace, a lead technology partner in the HazInfo research project, field tested 16 Addressable Radios for Emergency Alerts (AREAs) in the Sarvodaya Communities and 34 AREAs in the Sarvodaya District Centers. Although the AREA solutions lacked bi-directional communication and seemed the least effective, the AREA solution proved to…

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Tags: addressable/broadcast technology, Alberta, AREA addressable/broadcast technology, Bengkulu, CDMA, cellular telephone, Gordon Gow, GSM, India, Jaipur, Mile Hazard Warning, Peter Anderson, Simon Fraser University, Sri Lanka, Srinivasan Rangarajan, University of Alberta, Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications.

HazInfo Paper Accepted for the 1st WRECOM Conference in Rome, Italy

Nuwan Waidyanatha

on July 30, 2007

Paper titled “Community-based Hazard Warnings in Rural Sri Lanka: Performance of a Last-Mile Message Relay”, authors – Gordon Gow (Associate Professor, Faculty of Extensions, University of Alberta, Canada), Peter Anderson (Associate Professor, Department of Telematics, Simon Fraser University, Canada), and Nuwan Waidyanatha (Project Manager, Last-Mile Hazard Warning Systems, LIRNEasia, Sri Lanka), will be presented at the 1^st Wireless Rural Emergency Communication Conference. The WRECOM 2007 Conference is jointly organized by the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, the IEEE Communications Society and the Vehicular Technology/Communications Society joint Chapter Italy Section. The conference will take place in Rome, October 1-2, 2007.

The HazInfo project realized that early warnings via Information Communication Technology (ICT) must be a point-to-multi-point application and is best accommodate by Wireless ICTs. The HazInfo pilot included outfitting…

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Tags: Alberta, Canada, Community, Faculty of Extensions, Gordon Gow, IEEE Communications Society, International Development Research Center, Mile Hazard, Mile Message Relay, Peter Anderson, Rome, Simon Fraser University, Sri Lanka, st Wireless, University of Alberta, University of Rome, wireless communication equipment, Wireless ICTs.

Colloquium on Real-Time Biosurveillance For Early Warnings in Sri Lanka

Tahani Iqbal

on October 12, 2006

Assume a scenario where among the chief complaint strings of two unrelated patients in the same District on the same date there was a mention of bloody stools in pediatric cases. The multiple mentions of “bloody stools” or “pediatric” might not be surprising, but the tying together of these two factors, given matching geographic locations and timings of reporting, is sufficiently rare that seeing only two such cases is of interest. This was precisely the evidence that was the first noticeable signal of the tragic Walkerton, Canada, waterborne bacterial gastroenteritis outbreak caused by contamination of tap water in May 2000. That weak signal was spotted by an astute physician, not by a surveillance system. Reliable automated detection of such signals in multivariate data requires new…

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Tags: Alberta, Artur Dubrawski, Base Hospital, Canada, CDMA, data algorithms, Gates, Gates Foundation, Gordon Gow, GSM, last mile using information communication technology, Ministry of Health, mobile phones, personal computer applications, possible food complaints, Sri Lanka, University of Alberta, USD, USDA, Walkerton, wireless local loop, Wireless Local Loop Network Applications.

Live Feed: Common Alerting Protocol Workshop of the Last Mile HazInfo Project in Sri Lanka

Nuwan Waidyanatha

on July 21, 2006

Nandan Jayasinghe –

We will start the event by lighting the traditional oil lamp. Next is a 2 minute meditation.

Nuwan Waidyanatha –

Welcome all partners including, Dr. Gordon Gow (University of Alberta), Dr. Dileeka Dias (Director Dialog Communication Research Lab), Prof Rohan Samarajiva (Director LIRNEasia), Mr. Nanadana Jayasinghe (Director Sarvodaya Disaster Management center), most importantly the Sarvodaya Participants (ICT Guardians).

Rohan Samarajiva –

We started the lat Mile HazInfo Program on January 23, 2006. The objective of my talk is to introduce you to the framework used in this project. The attendees are people who have faced the great tragedy that happened in December 26, 2004. Since then, 20 months later, we still have no solution in our nation.

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Tags: Aburizal Bakrie, Addressable Satellite Radio, Alberta, alerting solution, All communication systems, Associated Press, Australia, Dialog Communication Research Lab, Dileeka Dias, early warning solution, earthquake, good information communication network, Gordon Gow, Indian Ocean, Indonesia, Java, link technologies, messages to multiple technologies, mobile phones, multi-media dissemination, Nanadana Jayasinghe, oil lamp, Open source protocol, point-to-multiple media, raw software code, Rohan Samarajiva, SMS, Sri Lanka, Thailand, tsunami, University of Alberta, WAP, web links, wireless networks, XML.

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