Transnational Partnership for Excellent Research and Education in Big Data and Emergency Management

Emergency management has become a problem for authorities across the world because the frequency of disasters such as floods, landslides, earthquakes, and even riots have considerably have increased.

As with natural disasters, such health, infrastructure and security incidents can critically impact people and jeopardize public safety. With a current focus on moving from reacting to these events as they happen towards preventing and minimizing them, big data play a critical role in societal ability to plan, prepare and recover from emergency events.

The project “Transnational Partnership for Excellent Research and Education in Big Data and Emergency Management (BDEM)”, aims through cooperation between Vestlandsforsking, University of Bergen and six world class departments from the USA and Japan, to establish a long term partnership where excellent education is to be embedded in excellent research in big data and emergency management.  The project has multiple partner institutions in three countries, and thus has the potential to be an extensive network that connects many researchers, faculties and students. The BDEM research and education network will be coordinated by Vestlandsforsking and will run for a term of three years.

Master students with relevant backgrounds will be integrated into Vestlandsforsking’s and the partners’ ongoing research with academic publications as the final goal. A high quality of student and faculty mobility will be established. This will result in enhanced education and the development of expertise into Norwegian academia, e.g. BDEM curricula into the professional training of research education of tomorrow’s data scientists, researchers and policy-makers. It will also result in deeper research collaboration, which in turn will enrich the educational track of Norwegian Master students. The increased contact and mobility will also help the researchers’ possibilities of getting collaborators and relevant hosts for their research stays in the USA and Japan and Hong Kong.

BDEM consortium will not only communicate within the BDEM related research community but also with other related businesses and public sector organisations with the impact to give the BDEM more visibility.

NORWEGIAN PARTNER INSTITUTIONS:

Western Norway Research Institute  (BDEM Project Manager: Rajendra Akerkar)
University of Bergen  (Local Project manager: Andreas Lothe Opdahl)

INTERNATIONAL PARTNER INSTITUTIONS:

George Mason University , USA  (Local project manager:  Hemant Purohit)
Illinois Institute of Technology, USA (Local project manager:  Aron Culotta)
San Diego State University, USA (Local project manager:  André Skupin)
National Institute of Informatics, Japan (Local project manager: Yusheng Ji)
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong (Local project manager: Song Guo)
The University of Tokyo, Japan (Local project manager: Xuan Song)