Wednesday, 19th February 2020
9:45h Climate Change as an Enabler of Wildfire
Matthew Jones, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
10:05h The Next Innovation in Humanitarian Technology Must Be Radical Inclusion
Patrick Meier, WeRobotics
10:25h Keynote Q&A
14:00h EU Next Generation Emergency Mapping
Konstanze Lechner, German Aerospace Center (DLR/DRIVER+)
16:30h Knowledge Management, because the Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts
Karmen Poljansek, disaster risk management knowledge centre (DRMKC), European Commission
Thursday, 20th February 2020
9:40h Strenghtening Links between Technologies and Society for European Disaster Resilience
Kees Boersma, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
11:25h An example of the National Uptake of Security Research Outputs: The Lithuanian Model of Centres of Competence
Egidija Versinskiene, Lithuanian Cybercrime Center of Excellence for Training, Research & Education (L3CE)
MEET OUR SPEAKERS
Albrecht beck (facilitator)
Prepared International
Dr. Albrecht Beck is the Managing Director of Prepared International, a consultancy firm based on leading experts in the field of disaster management and preparedness. Until recently, he has held the position of Global Mass Evacuation Coordinator of the United Nations.
Prior to this post, he was the Disaster Preparedness Expert for Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA). Albrecht is a leading expert in the field of Mass Evacuations and disaster risk diplomacy. He is a Guest Professor at the United Nations University and was heading International Disaster Coordination in more than 13 mass disaster events.
Kees Boersma
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Dr. Kees Boersma is Associate Professor and Director of Research of the Department of Organization Sciences of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA). He is especially interested in how people, including professional responders, volunteers and citizens, give meaning to what they actually do during crisis situations. He also investigates how the various actors use ICT for information sharing, mobilisation, steering and coordination.
Kees Boersma is (co) editor of several books and journals on crisis and disaster governance. He has been a board member of the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) association for two years in a row. As an ‘academic traveller’ he has walked in the fields of engineering, innovation studies, history of science and technology, science and technology studies, organization science and public administration, surveillance studies and criminology, urban studies, and crisis and disaster management.
MATTHEW JONES
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change
Dr. Matthew Jones is Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia. He recently joined the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research following a postdoctoral research role at Swansea University. Matt has a broad interest in the global carbon cycle and a particular focus on the roles of landscape fires and fossil fuel combustion in this cycle.
Matthew contributes to international collaborative efforts to quantify the global carbon budget, which accounts for emissions of carbon from fossil fuel combustion and land use change and the uptake of carbon by the terrestrial biosphere and by oceans.
Matthew‘s work has focussed on the legacy effects of fire on the terrestrial carbon cycle. Historical landscape fires influence the modern carbon budget, while present-day fires will continue to influence this budget in the coming decades, centuries and even millennia. Matt holds a PhD in Physical Geography at the University of Exeter.
Konstanze Lechner
DLR/DRIVER+
Dr. Konstanze Lechner received a degree in applied environmental sciences at the University of Trier, Germany in 2004 and the Ph.D. in physical geography at the University of Bonn, Germany in 2008. Since 2008, she is scientific employee at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) for the Center for Satellite based Crisis Information (ZKI). As senior researcher she has been coordinating national and international research projects on the use of Earth Observation data for crisis management, humanitarian relief and in the field of civil security. Main topics are the Earth Observation-based monitoring of crisis situations as well as linking research with operations through close interaction and cooperation with users. Within DRIVER+ she had two roles: She supported trials as practitioner with innovative ZKI tools and she was trial owner coordinating T3.
Patrick Meier
WeRobotics
Over the past 15+ years, Dr. Patrick Meier has worked on a wide range of humanitarian technology projects with multiple international organizations including the United Nations, Red Cross, World Bank and 30+ other organizations like the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Planet Labs, Facebook, Ushahidi and QCRI. His book, Digital Humanitarians, has been praised by experts at the UN, Red Cross, World Bank, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford and others.
Patrick serves as the Executive Director of WeRobotics, which scales the positive impact of humanitarian operations through the localization of appropriate robotics solutions. Prior to WeRobotics, he co-founded the Digital Humanitarian Network and served on the Innovation Team of the UN Secretary-General’s World Humanitarian Summit (WHS).
He also served as a fellow at MIT and Stanford and holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and an MA from Columbia University. Patrick was born and raised in Africa.
Karmen Poljansek
Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre (DRMKC)
Dr. Karmen Poljansek has a PhD in earthquake engineering. She works in a team of Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre at European Commission, Joint Research Center (Italy). She is a specialist of earthquake risk assessment of critical infrastructures, multihazard risk assessment methodologies as well as disaster risk reduction policies at EU and world level.
Karmen’s recent activities range from developing a concept and methodology of INFORM Global index, a tool for understanding the risk of humanitarian crises and disasters, to developing standardized European approach to systematically record and manage disaster loss databases. She was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the first DRMKC flagship multi-author report “Science for disaster risk management 2017: knowing better and losing less. Now she is a scientific coordinator of INFORM development at JRC and she is coordinating the preparation of the Recommendations for National Risk Assessment for DRM in EU.
Egidija Versinskiene
L3CE
Egidija Veršinskienė is Director of the Lithuanian Cybercrime Center of Excellence for Training, Research & Education (L3CE), a non-profit NGO which invests in technology, conducts research, and manages Open Source Intelligence projects focusing on illegal interference incidents — related to data, systems or operation of computers — affecting a wide range of foreign countries. Egidija has a wealth of experience in the expert use of Open Source Intelligence Tools (OSINT), visual analytics and integration platforms aimed at protecting and supporting strategic decision-making processes.
L3CE coordinates an international network of Centers of Excellence (for example, the SENTER Network) that brings together a unique set of EU research organisations operating in the domain of cybercrime at the intersection of scientific excellence, technological innovation, as well as the social sciences. In the security domain generally, L3CE also addresses information warfare, hybrid threats and full-spectrum awareness of cybersecurity itself