The first international conference on ‘Intelligent Solutions for Emergency Response and Disaster Management’ (ISERDM-2023) got off to a start at National Institute of Technology - Tiruchi on Monday, bringing together experts covering diverse fields from machine learning to Geographic Information Systems to advanced scientific computing.
Organised jointly with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Thiruvananthapuram, functioning under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the conference envisages addressing computing challenges posed by disasters, right from their modelling such as flood, glacier meltdown to coordination of efforts from different teams, which could be solved efficiently by supercomputers. A supercomputer named Paramporul was established on NIT-T campus by C-DAC last year for the purpose.
Lectures of diverse themes ranging from Artificial Intelligence, System Resource Management, Monitoring, Emergency Response, Emergency Rescue, Disaster Management, Prediction and Relief have been lined up for the three-day conference.
Inaugurating the conference, V. Thiruppugazh, Chairman, Advisory Committee on Flood Mitigation for Chennai Metro and former advisor, National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Ministry of Home Affairs, said sustainable resilience to disasters could happen only if development and disaster management went together
Though India ranked second in the world in terms of number of people vulnerable to climate change, there was a lack of awareness of risks induced by disasters such as earthquakes, floods and drought. Economic losses kept increasing over the years due to reckless planning and development activities, especially in cities. Efficient regulations were in place to ensure safety in development projects, but their implementation needed tremendous improvement, he said.
E. Magesh, Director General, C-DAC, explained the working of the indigenously developed electronic hardware systems for defence and strategic applications, processors and supercomputers. The 112 Emergency Response Support system (ERSS) was already active in 26 States and union territories, and its implementation in other States would attain completion in the coming months, he said.
A. Kalai Selvan, Director, C-DAC, dwelt on how the ERSS integrated emergency response centres in individual States, coordinating the approaches of the police forces, fire brigade and healthcare professionals.
A 28-hour Hackathon was organised by NIT-T and Datanetiix for undergraduate students in connection with the conference. N. Kumaresan, Dean, Faculty Welfare, NIT-T, initated the Hackathon by reading out the problem statements to the 58 participating teams in the domains of App Development, Machine Learning, Data Science and IT/Web security
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