Tag: Disaster Management

IIT Kharagpur develops COVID-19 Predictive Model for Decision-making

The study also predicts that new cases of the disease will continue until at least the end of September 2020.

India Today        Hindustan Times                 Times of India        Economic Times (Health)         Business Insider           News 18       Outlook          The New Indian Express          Down to Earth          NDTV          The Hindu            India Blooms             Telangana Today       Lokmat             Navbharat Times           Dainik Jagran

IIT Kharagpur has developed a prediction system to help predict the future spread of COVID-19 and help decision making in health-care, industry, economy, and even academics. Prof. Abhijit Das from the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering has developed a logistic model which can be used to fit the available daily counts of infection cases.

The data used for the predictions pertain to the entire country, and for the eight most affected  states in the country including Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh.

Talking about the model development Prof. Das said, “The model uses only the daily infection counts available in the public domain without accessing sensitive information pertaining to medical records or contact-tracing data for a large fraction of the population. Despite that, the prediction curves show remarkably good fitting with the past data, and can be used for future planning.”

Prof. Virendra Kumar Tewari, Director IIT Kharagpur said, “People have been living in an uncertain black box without the knowledge about which way life is going to turn and how to plan their activities. A study like this based on a clear statistical model will enable them to understand and plan their wayforward. The model though experimental could prove to be helpful in planning our academic semester and policy matters related to the Institute and the campus under the current circumstances.” 

However, the predictions for the future change quite rapidly with time. There are several potential factors for this such as different mobility patterns of Indian people in different phases of lockdown, large-scale migration of laborers, change in diagnostic facilities, evolution of the coronavirus, and so on. These are well beyond the control of the logistic model or any other currently known prediction model for that matter. 

Although the implementation fails to generate stable and reliable predictions at the moment, the trend clearly reveals that the disease is going to stay in the country for many more months. 

“Our study indicates that India is yet to achieve a steady pattern in the spread of the disease. It is unlikely to get rid of COVID-19 before the end of September 2020,” remarked Prof. Das.

He further added, “This does not leave us in a region of comfort, but the reality has to be accepted, and appropriate plans must be chalked out to address all the issues associated with the outbreak of the pandemic.”

Download Report

Contacts: 

Project Information: abhij@cse.iitkgp.ac.in; Institute Related: Prof. B N Singh, registrar@hijli.iitkgp.ac.in; Media Outreach: Shreyoshi Ghosh, shreyoshi@adm.iitkgp.ac.in; More News:: https://kgpchronicle.iitkgp.ac.in/; Follow IIT Kharagpur on Social Media: Facebook:@IIT.Kgp; Twitter: @IITKgp; Instagram: @iit.kgp

VGSOM Assigns COVID Case Study

IIT Kharagpur’s Vinod Gupta School of Management assigns Pandemic Case Study for Organizational Leadership education

It has been almost 2 weeks since the teaching and learning at IIT Kharagpur has gone virtual. The Center for Educational Technology at the Institute has been using the online interface Webex for conducting classes across all levels of study. Shorter sessions are also being conducted through Zoom. 

Several research groups are also conducting studies on people’s perception and behaviour towards COVID-19 through progression of time. In one such initiative, the Vinod Gupta School of Management, business school in India of IIT Kharagpur ranked among the top ten in India, has launched a project based on COVID-19 pandemic. The project titled “Invisible Leadership and the CoronaVirus Pandemic” is being assigned 126 students in the second year MBA class at the School as part of the Organisational Leadership course.

Speaking about the project Prof. Susmita Mukhopadhyay said, “Pandemic or any other wide spread disease such as COVID-19 demand exemplary leadership and decision-making capabilities to manage finances, human resources, supply chain and overall business operations. Managers if prepared for desperate times may even plan and improvise the desperate measures. The project aims to teach the students to see the power of invisible leadership in the fight against a pandemic.”

“Leadership is more about taking tough decisions now while keeping the greater good in mind than appeasing your countrymen with misleading information. Covid-19 has turned every one of us into soldiers fighting for the very survival of our species and the real leader here is invisible. So when we miss the leader micromanaging things, we look inward for leadership,” said Pinak Samui, student at VGSOM.

The students will be studying the facts from diverse shades of leadership and understand the ethical issues connected to such situations as COVID-19 pandemic. They will also explore whether the Pandemic itself has acted as an invisible leader in enhancing work-life balance of people, cohabitation of species and environmental sustainability.

“We have given the topic to the students to have a free flow of thought and explore the topic from various perspectives, frame the case based on archival news and keep track of day to day developments and strategies undertaken by governments and other related stakeholders. We plan to develop business case studies based on the project output,” remarked Prof Biplab Datta.

Student Feedback:

“This assignment has helped us to keep track of the COVID-19 situation and all related happenings as they are happening around the world. It also helped us to dive deep into the invisible leadership principle and apply the same, in order to add a new perspective to the current situation, just like looking through a different lens,” said a student Pritam Sharma.

 

Sharing about his learning, another student Aniket Sanyal said, “Leaders, who can take quick actions, who are flexible in adapting their bold decisions to suit the needs of a situation, will have more success in a crisis environment.”

Social Media to Help Disaster Relief

Economic Times   Gadget Now   India Today   Business Standard  Business Standard (PTI)   Devdiscourse  VC Circle

Your posts on social media and internal messaging applications can now help victims receive relief during natural disasters. While you tweet about the situation of the victims in specific locations in English or Hindi, a computer program can read through your empathetic post and send the relevant information to nearby relief operators. A research team led by Dr. Saptarshi Ghosh from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kharagpur is developing the algorithms for this task.

At the wake of the recent Kerala floods and other disasters in the past few years, the country has witnessed a significant rise in the real-time news regarding the disaster locations, victims, relief operations and call for help. Following these disasters, various social media platforms become important sources of real-time information regarding the disasters, coming from victims, on-site volunteers and empathizers all of whom act as “social sensors”.

In the aftermath of the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal, an NGO of medical practitioners “Doctors For You” posted information on their WhatsApp group, on the medical requirements after the earthquake. They shared access to the WhatsApp group with the research team of Dr. Ghosh who studied the exchanges between medical practitioners during a three-month period following the earthquake. Several insights were extracted on what are typical medical requirements after a major earthquake, for better preparedness at the wake of such events in fthe uture. “For instance, in the week just after the earthquake, the main concern is to deal with bone injuries and psychological trauma. In the later weeks, the focus has to shift to taking care of pregnant women and children, and to water-borne diseases,” confirmed Dr. Ghosh. The findings from the study were published in the journals International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction and Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness.

The team did further research with tweets posted during Chennai floods in 2016. Using the algorithm they found tweets with contact information, asking for drinking water, or calls for help required by adults and infants. There were also tweets that informed about the availability of resources such as drinking water in particular regions. Such posts on social media and internal messaging services could be extremely helpful for carrying our relief operations or plan in advance for disaster management. However, due to the huge volume and the rapid rates of posts related to the disasters, it is cumbersome to locate relevant messages which can contribute to enhancing situational awareness in the disaster-affected region.

“Only about 2% of the information tweeted in a disaster scenario turns out to be useful for relief operations, which is humanly not possible to identify. The critical information is immersed in large amounts of conversational content where people mostly express sympathy for the victims of the disaster. Our intelligent automated methods can identify and extract such critical information in real-time and in summarized form, which could be extremely helpful towards disaster management,” explained Dr. Saptarshi Ghosh.

The algorithms developed by the IIT KGP research team can search English and Hindi posts on various social media handles, especially micro-blogging sites, and IM services, and can extract and summarize critical situational information during disasters. The team has used advanced Neural Network and Deep Learning models to identify critical information from the informal language of social media posts, which lack grammar, contain arbitrary shortenings of words (e.g., ‘medicines’ shortened as ‘meds’), etc. Attempts are going on towards filtering and extracting information from disaster-related images posted on social media, which is also a challenging problem.

At present, the team is developing Web-based systems and mobile applications for aiding post-disaster relief operations. The systems will utilize the algorithms and perform tasks like identifying and extracting actionable information, summarizing the actionable information, etc. “The technology has reached a level where it can be deployed for use by relief operators. For instance, a person sitting in the control room can get live updates about what resources are needed where what resources are available and coordinate the relief operations accordingly. Or, a relief worker can get updates on his/her smartphone about people being trapped in the vicinity, so that they can be rescued.” said Dr. Ghosh.

The overall research work is being carried out in collaboration with Prof. Niloy Ganguly and Dr. Pawan Goyal from IIT Kharagpur (part of the Complex Network Research Group with which Dr. Ghosh is also associated), Prof. Somprakash Bandyopadhyay from IIM Kolkata, Dr. Arnab Jana from IIT Bombay, and Dr. Muhammad Imran, Qatar Computing Research Institute, and several students, notably Koustav Rudra and Moumita Basu.

The project has been jointly funded by IIT Kharagpur ISIRD grant, Microsoft Research India and ITRA, Media Labs Asia and DeITY, Govt. of India. Under the National Disaster Management Plan launched in 2016 development of such technologies are being supported. Recently, the Geological Survey of India has come up with a community-driven early warning system for landslide-prone areas in Darjeeling and training people to report rainfall threshold measurements which could lead to landslides.

“Availability of such trained volunteers operating our technology will be all the more effective in identifying and responding to social media queries and even promote the relevant information to people who could put them to use at the ground level” concluded Dr. Ghosh.

The innovation has been reported in several papers, the latest being in the popular journal ACM Transactions on the Web, and further publications are scheduled in the Springer journal Information Systems Frontiers.

Watch Videos

Utilizing Social Media for Disaster Relief   OSM Disaster System    Narmada  – Disaster Relief Assistant