From a cramped living room in Brooklyn, New York, a handful of young computer nerds has developed a new way to use technology to help\u00a0save lives in natural disasters.<\/p>\n
They have designed tiny electronic nodes inside baseball-sized rubber casings that create a special\u00a0Wi-Fi network spanning more than 100 square miles that can be used to connect victims and first responders. It\u2019s a simple and relatively cheap concept, but during a natural disaster when cell towers topple, technology fails and entire communities fall into darkness \u2013 communication can be the difference between life and death.<\/p>\n
The five young men met competing against each other at computer hackathons. They joined together to compete in a contest sponsored by\u00a0International Business Machines Corp.\u00a0last year called\u00a0Call for Code, which asked developers to use cloud, artificial intelligence and other technologies to amplify preparedness for natural disasters. Their entry, Project Owl, which stands for Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics, uses a \u201cclusterduck\u201d network made of hubs that resemble rubber ducks, which can float in flooded areas. Once deployed, civilians are able to get on their cellphone to connect with first responders. Emergency workers are also able to learn about weather and get information data analytics through the cloud.<\/p>\n
The team won the competition, beating more than 2,500 global entries, for a $200,000 grand prize. In March, they joined representatives from IBM to deploy the devices, known as DuckLinks, across five regions in Puerto Rico that were devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the worst disasters, chaos and misinformation are pervasive,\u201d said Bryan Knouse, 28, chief executive officer and co-founder of Project Owl. \u201cWith better information and better analytics, you can get the resources you need to the places that need it most.\u201d Other members of the team include Charlie Evans, 32, Nick Feuer, 25, Taraqur Rahman, 27, and Magus Pereira, 23.<\/p>\n
During the two-week pilot program, Project Owl attached DuckLinks with Velcro to trees in the jungle, perched them atop of sand dunes on beaches, stuck them on car doors and cliff faces and even floated them above buildings in helium balloons. Project Owl managed to create a live internet network across one square mile using 23 DuckLinks, communicating via the system in areas without cell reception.<\/p>\n
Once the devices are connected, an emergency Wi-Fi network appears on smartphones directing users to a portal where they can send messages to first responders and civil defense teams. The glue of the network is the Papa Duck, which is a cloud software service connected to all the DuckLinks. The Papa Duck offers a bird\u2019s-eye view of the number of civilians accessing the emergency portal and what they urgently need.<\/p>\n
Project Owl hopes to have enough tests done to make their network ready in a small capacity for hurricane season on the U.S.\u00a0 East Coast, which begins in July. Every second seems to count.<\/p>\n
Since 2000, more than 2.5 billion people have been directly affected by a natural disaster, with the economic impact in the trillions of dollars. Combined, 2017 and 2018 were the costliest years for weather-related disasters on record, with total losses of $653 billion, according to a recent analysis from U.K. insurance company\u00a0Aon Plc.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy hope is that we are able to set up internet networks quickly at a low cost and that they work,\u201d Knouse said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be fancy, crazy military technology; part of what makes a solution profound is being simple and creative.\u201d<\/p>\n
Greg Hauser, a communications branch manager for North Carolina Emergency Management, was responsible for getting the major networks back up and running after Hurricane Florence battered the Carolinas last September, killing 53 people and cutting power to almost two million. In order to restore connection, wireless carriers shifted portable towers into the counties that lost service. But in some cases this process took as long as 20 hours \u2013 leaving emergency responders offline and in the dark during the most critical rescue period.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf Project Owl could generate some type of network connectivity and generate it out of equipment they drop from the sky \u2013 that would be a game-changer for us,\u201d Hauser said.<\/p>\n
The Weather Company, owned by IBM, predicts seven hurricanes will strike in 2019, with the potential for three to be major events. While the Project Owl pilot program proved the system could work, the team knows it has a long way to go.<\/p>\n
Project Owl is still very much in the traditional start-up phase, Knouse said. The company\u2019s headquarters are currently in his living room in Brooklyn, with a bench to solder the DuckLinks together set up beside the couch. \u201cCalling it a living room would be embellishing the truth,\u201d Knouse said. \u201cIt\u2019s really a factory floor.\u201d<\/p>\n
They hope to one day connect an area up to 100 square miles or more, but for now are aiming for 10 square miles. The next deployment is planned later this month, with DuckLinks being velcroed to trees in a national park in Houston.<\/p>\n
A handful of young computer nerds has developed a new way to use technology to help save lives in natural disasters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":305188,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[835,749],"class_list":["post-305186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wireless","tag-ibm","tag-wi-fi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305186"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}