Digital University Kerala (DUK) has partnered with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and World Health Organisation (WHO) to organise a two-week knowledge workshop on Integration of Digital Technologies in Disaster Preparedness.
The workshop, which commences on May 16 and concludes on May 27, aims to address the lack of understanding and absence of requisite skills that hinder the broad application of digital technologies in combating disasters.
A DUK statement said that the workshop is part of an ongoing collaboration – funded by the British Council's Going Global Partnerships Exploratory Grant – between Sinnu Susan Thomas, an Assistant Professor at Digital University Kerala and Edilson K Arruda, a lecturer at the University of Southampton in the UK.
According to UNEP, despite the astounding advancement of digital technologies in all walks of human life that effectively set forth a technology revolution, dubbed the fourth industrial revolution, the potential of modern technologies remains under-exploited when it comes to disaster management and disaster risk reduction.
The workshop aims to create capacity building for government officials, students, and anyone interested in the use of modern technologies in disaster management. The event also envisaged deepening the understanding of the audience regarding the complexities of digital technologies, especially artificial intelligence, and equipping them for informed decision making in this field, it said.
Major domains of discussion will be learning response and recovery, visual perspective of disasters, robots and drones to the rescue, speech as an aid, emergency networking through trial and error, disaster management and related challenges, optimising and simulating logistics operations under uncertainty and logistics issues in humanitarian operations, the statement added.