Expo Islands

October 18, 2022 9:16 am Published by Leave a comment

Creative discussions and demos with our sponsors and partners.
Exhibitors: Google, NASA, Canada, Image Cat, TikTok, Anticipation Hub, Averted Disaster Photo Exhibition, GFDRR, City Resilience Program, Digital Earth Partnership, Brazilian National Secretary of Protection and Civil Defence. 

SCIENCE, TRUST AND SOCIETY (PART 2)

January 6, 2022 12:11 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

 

Science Trust and Society (Part 2)
(Part one available here)

Summary:

This interactive session will spark thinking on the central role of public trust in understanding risk and taking the right actions to reduce risks through a serious game.This panel will dig deeper into the critical role of trust in understanding and communicating risk, drawing on experience in emergencies, including the continuing COVID pandemic, as well as the long-running challenge of raising confidence in vaccines. Panellists will consider the roles of government, media and civil society in building trust and confidence, helping the public develop the critical tools they need to filter information and take better decisions in the face of risk.This interactive session will spark thinking on the central role of public trust in understanding risk and taking the right actions to reduce risks through a serious game.

Speakers:
Heidi Larson, David Reid, Leesa Lin,
David Chan, Julian Tang, Tang Tong

UR Asia Closing Ceremony

January 6, 2022 12:03 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

 

UR Asia Closing Ceremony

Summary:

Organisers, Olivia and Nathaniel wrap up UR Asia in style after a nice highlight video.

Speakers:

Olivia Jensen
Nathaniel Tan Qian Jin

Closing Keynote: What Have we Learned about Communicating Risks?

January 5, 2022 6:04 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

 

Closing Keynote

Summary:

Dr Freeman will speak about her own journey as a risk communicator, driven by a mission to inform, not persuade. Communicating risk has been a vital activity in the last two years – in some cases a genuinely life or death activity. People have been bombarded by numbers – of infections, deaths and vaccinations – and have tried hard to understand them. Despite real efforts to improve these communications, by designing and testing different ways of visualising the data, giving people scientific reasons for advice and being transparent about uncertainties (and difficult points, like the side-effects of vaccines) has still proven to be extremely challenging. Seeking ways to express the quality of evidence underlying the numbers also raises another obstacle to communicate the risks, which helps people develop their own understanding of likelihood and impact, based on statistical evidence, but framed within their own personal context. Drawing on 25 years of experience as a communicator, Dr Freeman will explain what has been learned about this interplay between statistical evidence and personal context and what the future challenges are. She will draw on an ongoing project focusing on the communication of earthquake forecasts, which are particularly difficult to get across, given their low probabilities and high uncertainties.

Speakers:

Alex Freeman

Day 2,Session 10

January 5, 2022 6:00 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

 

The Gift of Perpetual Giving

Summary:

Climate extremes that have been impacting cities in recent years – including floods, droughts, cyclones – collide with existing challenges of aging and inadequate urban infrastructure, preventing cities from full economic recovery. The impacts of these events have of course then been magnified in recent years by rapidly spreading Covid-19. Given the increasing vulnerabilities that cities are facing, it is critical that city leaders maintain public communication and trust in the face of unknown future scenarios and risks. This reality places increasing pressure and challenge upon city leaders. The visionary leaders of tomorrow must be equipped with the skills and expertise to be able to galvanlize and unite communities to respond to multiple ongoing risks in a resilient and equitable manner.
Resilient Cities Nework website: https://resilientcitiesnetwork.org/ Resilient Cities Nework LinkedIn: @Resilient Cities Network Resilient Cities Nework Facebook/Twitter/Instagram: @RCitiesNetwork

Speakers:

Deborah Lim
Speak Cryptic

City Leaders Speak: Maintaining Vision in a World with Increasing Risks

January 5, 2022 5:55 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

 

City Leaders Speak: Maintaining Vision in a World with Increasing Risks

Summary:

Climate extremes that have been impacting cities in recent years – including floods, droughts, cyclones – collide with existing challenges of aging and inadequate urban infrastructure, preventing cities from full economic recovery. The impacts of these events have of course then been magnified in recent years by rapidly spreading Covid-19. Given the increasing vulnerabilities that cities are facing, it is critical that city leaders maintain public communication and trust in the face of unknown future scenarios and risks. This reality places increasing pressure and challenge upon city leaders. The visionary leaders of tomorrow must be equipped with the skills and expertise to be able to galvanlize and unite communities to respond to multiple ongoing risks in a resilient and equitable manner.
Resilient Cities Nework website: https://resilientcitiesnetwork.org/ Resilient Cities Nework LinkedIn: @Resilient Cities Network Resilient Cities Nework Facebook/Twitter/Instagram: @RCitiesNetwork

Speakers:

Lauren Sorkin
Francis Ghesquiere
Mike Gillooly
Hemali Boghawala
Elaine Tan

Risk Know-How

January 5, 2022 5:52 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

 

Risk Know-How (IPUR)

Summary:

How do we empower people communicating about risks in their communities to navigate information and to take part in constructive discussions about risk? This participative session will engage the audience in developing a framework for risk know-how and identify the steps needed to achieve it in communities around the world.

Speakers:

Tracey Brown
Mariko Nishizawa
Bernard Okebe
Wandi Bruine de Bruin

Understanding Extreme Urban Heat – Launch of the Digital Earth Partnership Technology Award

January 5, 2022 5:29 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

 

Understanding Extreme Urban Heat – Launch of the Digital Earth Partnership Technology Award

Summary:

Background: Climate change is driving rising temperatures in East Asian cities, the effects of which are being compounded by the urban heat island effect that is associated with the modification of land surfaces due to urbanization. And these rising urban temperatures threaten to have adverse impacts on the productivity, inclusion, and livability of the region’s cities. Experts predict mean annual temperatures in East Asia will increase by up to 3.8 °C by the century’s end. Some parts of the region may see much greater increases. In the best-case scenario, Myanmar and Thailand can expect 80-90 days per year with temperatures over 35 °C by 2050, an increase of roughly 20 days from today. This increase in temperature will be much worse in cities where the Urban Heat Island Effect could raise temperatures by a further 7 °C. Urban heat is strongly corelated with reduced productivity, poorer education and health outcomes, and more crime. This is especially true for low income countries as the UHI effect disproportionately impacts poor or otherwise excluded communities. Objectives: To provide for better measurement of urban temperatures and understanding of its impacts on key urban development outcomes, Singapore Space & Technology Limited and the World Bank Group, with financial support from the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), are launching the “Digital Earth Partnership Technology Award”. This award aims to source for space tech organisations to utilise remote sensing satellite technology to acquire and process satellite data to better measure temperatures in East Asian cities and analyse the strength of the UHI effect, which will also include ground-truthing work to help verify the satellite-based estimates for a select number of East Asian cities: Jakarta (IDN), Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Manila (Philippines), Phnom Penh (Cambodia), and Vietiane (Lao PDR). To launch the award, this session will bring together speakers from industry, the World Bank and Singapore Space & Technology to discuss, from their different perspectives, the challenges posed by rising urban temperatures, strategies that are being adopted to deal with these challenges, and how, by leveraging advances in space technology, the award can contribute to more evidence-based policy and decision-making when it comes to both mitigating and adapting to the impacts of extreme urban heat.

Speakers:

Stéphane Hallegatte
Lynette Tan
Pedro Santa-Rivera
Nicolette Yeo

Responsible AI for DRM

January 5, 2022 5:25 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

 

Responsible AI for DRM (Robert Soden, Toronto)

Summary:

Featuring an interview with Robert Soden from the University of Toronto.

Speakers:

Robert Soden

Enhancing Resilience of Smart Cities through Cognitive Computing Technology

January 5, 2022 5:21 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

 

Enhancing Resilience of Smart Cities through Cognitive Computing Technology

Summary:

The resilience of a modern society comprises both infrastructure and social resilience. Social and cognitive factors are essential for making a populated area such as a city, more resilient. Smart cities allow for the integration of cognitive computing technology and cognitive engineering approaches with the goal of improving the quality of human decision-making, e.g., less error-prone and faster. This simultaneously fosters sense-making and cognition at organizational and community levels, and helps to prevent, mitigate, respond to and recover from potential disruptions. We will demonstrate and discuss examples including improving cognitive resilience in control rooms through cognition-aware human computer interaction, and detecting weak signals in social networks. In addition, we will show how social media can be integrated with machine learning and natural language processing techniques to obtain public opinions towards government policies, which can be used as effective feedback for policy adjustment so as to achieve improved social resilience.

Speakers:

Jonas Jörin
Kezhi Mao
Martin Raubal
Majeed Khader