Waidy's Spot-On Blogs

CAP Text not allowed to Speak in USA

2012-02-13T22:51:00.004+08:00

The U.S. has banned Emergency Alerting Systems from using Text-To-Speech in broadcasting Common Alerting Protocol generated messages.

Excerpt from the article – Many of those in my community have a hard time understanding the current version of text to speech. In other words, us old folks can’t hear what the computer is saying. There’s also the issue of geographical differences in words. For example, is “soda” and “pop” the same as “soda pop” or “Coke”. If one were to write “I’d like a Coke and fries”, the computer will read that hearer may need more information, ex. “We don’t serve Coke, is Royal Crown Cola OK?”

Here's what I had to say in the LIRNEasia blog relating it to the Freedom Fone and Sahana project.

Sahana Google Code-In Students work on CAP Broker

2012-02-01T18:13:00.010+08:00

Once again Sahana participated in 2011 Google Code-In. Happy to have been part of it mentoring students. A big thrill was that they worked on the few research tasks that were related to the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Broker. The two main tasks were:

develop a blueprint with wireframe to port the Sahana Agasti CAP Broker to Sahana Eden (because Sahana Agasti CAP Broker is no longer supported by the community; moreover, the new version that will be built in to Eden would build on the lessons learned and improve the shortcomings from the piece-wise build original version)
develop a wireframe to build an XSL Editor (mainly to develop XSL files to transform full CAP messages to deliver through short-text, long-text, and voice-text messages through email, SMS, IVR, Twitter, etc)

The CAP Broker is a tool that I have been researching on and developing over the past six years. The real need of a CAP Broker is in early warning. Based on the systems definition for early warning system, it requires a Broker to acts as a messaging pivot between those who publish alerts/warnings and those who subscribe to them.

The first works were with the HazInfo project, when we tested various wireless technologies for their ability to carry CAP messages to last-mile communities. There was an opportunity to further develop and test it for cyclones and hurricanes but we failed to win the hearts of NSA to nail the grant. There was also interest to build the libraries and test components that would carry CAP messages over Radio Data Systems; however, could not secure any funding to try this as well.

What we did achieve was testing CAP over HF data platform. The first working Sahana CAP broker was tested for health alerting with delivery over HTTP, Email, SMS, and RSS. Then recently, the field testing of CAP messages disseminated through an IVR.

STANDBY ... There's more work to be done and shared.

Social Network Stats are Wrong Wrong

2012-01-05T13:47:00.008+08:00

I caught this InfoGraphic on "how the world uses social networks" off a tweet. Once you read it you notice that it excludes India and China the two worlds largest populations. Those two countries are also Internet giants; especially China. I don't know about India but living in Kunming, China I know and see how people use, the famous QQ (here's the link to the International version). This author: Tony D’Altorio (Investment U Research) does a nice economic analysis on "How Does Renren Compare to Facebook?". One would say that the Chinese versions are not international and if it was would foreigners use it. Tencent does offer QQ in six languages for now. This article: "Will Foreigners Use a Chinese Microblog if the Version is in English?" tells a good story how certain industries can capitalize. I have a QQ account but the problem is that Tencent does not offer a desktop QQ Linux version of the international package yet. Moreover, for me to Weibo (microblog like twitter) I need a Chinese ID number; i.e. for citizens only! These requirements are not barriers to enter Twitter or Facebook.

A nifty way to test Speech-To-Text uncertainties with ITU's Difficulty Percentage measure

2011-12-16T15:01:00.002+08:00

In these experiments the LIRNEasia researchers used Freedom Fone Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. First they conducted a survey with known values for the subjects to pick from. These answers were submitted through the IVR. Since the values were known to the human quality testers, this part of the experiment was associated with a speech-to-text trained system (or a speaker-dependent system or voice recognition type system). The second part involved the subjects submitting data that was not based on preset values. They were free to submit answers to questions as they pleased. This was regarded as an untrained or speaker-independent system.

Emulating Speech-To-Text Reliability with ITU Difficulty Scores

"The results show that with a speaker dependent system 95% of the information could be clearly deciphered opposed a speaker independent system that was only 70% clear (blue areas in Figure 1 and Figure 2). It is not surprising, the outcomes are intuitive. In our study reliability had two components, one was efficiency and the other was voice quality. The voice quality also took in to consideration the Mean Opinion Score and the Comparison Categorical Rating. The researchers wish to acknowledge that their may be disagreements in the sample sizes and number of Evaluators. These results are not ideal for drawing a ‘for-all” kind of conclusion. However, at this realize stage of the research it provides a quick and easy method to draw initial conclusions." ...Click to read full article

Interactive voice for a volunteer organization to manage disasters

2011-11-30T14:51:00.003+08:00

Crowd sourcing emergency information with Interactive Voice:

"CERT members call one of the four telephone numbers to access Freedom Fone; then press the “reporting” menu item number on their phone keypad to record a “field observation report”. That report is received and stored in the Freedom Fone inbox as an audio file (MP3) at Sarvodaya’s Hazard Information Hub (essentially the data center belonging to the Sarvodaya Community Disaster Management Center). Trained HIH Operators (HIHO) listen to those local language spoken incident field observations, then transform them in to English language text to feed in to the Sahana Eden, Emergency Data Exchange Language Situational Reporting (SITREP) application."
click to read full story

A decision support system for managing politicians during a disaster

2011-11-30T14:35:00.003+08:00

Crisis mapping, disasters and aid: A new paradigm:

Prezi presentation on ICCM 2011 by Geeks Without Borders

"It offered key actors and their proxies – some of whom could not be seen together, many of whom were out of Sri Lanka – the ability to in real time or asynchronously, communicate ideas, conduct discussions, upload documents for review, jointly edit them, map out positions and interests of political parties and non-state actors, flesh out and debate public stances and be informed by a range of decision support tools, including a library I curated with resources on peacebuilding. When the tsunami hit, the local and international networks connected via Groove were in a matter of hours turned into a decision support system for relief and aid work. At its peak, over 300 national and international entities, including the Prime Minister’s Office, Sarvodaya and even the US Southern Command, involved in relief efforts in South East Asia, were part of the Groove workspaces set up in Sri Lanka."

Published in The Nation newspaper on 20th November 2011.

Filed under: ICT for Peacebuilding

Real-Time Biosurveillance Pilot - Technical Report

2011-03-02T10:54:00.014+08:00

The Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) was a multi-partner initiative to study the potential for new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to improve early detection and notification of disease outbreaks in selected regions of Sri Lanka and India. Experts in the field of biosurveillance and health informatics have argued that improvements in disease detection and notification can be achieved by introducing more efficient means of gathering, analyzing, and reporting on data from multiple locations. New ICTs are regarded as an important means to achieve these efficiency gains. The primary research objective of RTBP was to examine these claims more closely by producing evidence to indicate in what ways and to what extent the introduction of new ICTs might achieve efficiency gains when integrated with existing disease surveillance and detection systems.

The project achieved a number of key objectives at the outset, including the development of a Java-based application for collecting patient data using low cost mobile phones; the successful implementation of Auton Lab’s analytic software and T-Cube Web Interface for analyzing patient records and near real-time prediction of disease outbreaks; and the adoption and implementation of Common Alerting Protocol for multi-channel health alerting. Moreover, the project team successfully integrated each of these three key components into an operational system that collected individual patient records, over 330,000 in Sri Lanka and over 130,000 in India, over a 15 month course of study. Over the life of the project, the system identified over a dozen instances of potential disease outbreaks, with four of those (Chicken Pox, Acute Diarrheal Disease, Respiratory Tract Infection, and Mumps) being confirmed by health authorities. The project demonstrated that new ICTs can dramatically reduce turnaround time for outbreak detection and alerting, from current period of weeks to a matter of days or even hours. The project also demonstrated the feasibility of using low cost mobile phones and existing commercial cellular infrastructure and services to enable affordable, real-time reporting of patient records from frontline health centers.

Overall results from our work demonstrate the feasibility of introducing an RTBP from a technical and operational standpoint. Initial findings show significant efficiency gains in terms of disease reporting, outbreak detection, and health alerting; with cost savings over 35% in both countries when compared to the existing systems. However, further research is needed to better understand the challenges associated with scaling such a system up to a regional or national level of implementation. In particular, further work needs to be done to optimize data entry over low cost mobile devices, to address usability and training requirements for the analytics platform, and to continue to enhance and integrate health alerting into national and regional systems and practices. Moreover, extensive stakeholder consultation will be necessary to ensure the various policy, legal, and operational implications of a national or regional RTBP are better understood, addressed, and effectively managed in the future.

It was a tiring and exciting experience but helped towards change adaptation whereby health professionals in the respective pilot countries were exposed to new ways of public health maintenance. I am delighted to have developed the proposal, gotten funding, and directed the project in achieving in terms of important empirical findings on the usefulness of this type of system, as well as achieving impressive outcomes around the greater adoption of the RTBP.

This project was made possible through a grant from the International Development Research Center of Canada. This project recently ended in December of 2010. This blog is to share the final technical report with researchers and practitioners.

Click to view the Real-Time Biosurveillance Program Final Technical Report.

mobiles in support of Sentinel Site Surveillance

2010-12-14T09:46:00.009+08:00

Sentinel Site Surveillance procedures are a popular public health practice in many countries, including Sri Lanka. Priority health data communication, case site investigations, and statical reporting are the key preliminary operations. The present day paper based procedures do not provide the much needed timeliness in completing these tasks.
The Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) is a pilot project designed and lead by LIRNEasia. The pilot which ends in December 2010 showed promising results to the extent that the Wayamba Provincial Director of Health Services (PDHS) has expressed interest in scaling the project from a dozen hospitals to all fifty hospitals in the pilot district, with the aim of nationalizing after studying and rectifying the scalability issue. The mobile health software developed for the project was a simple application that digitized the optimal set of outpatient and inward data: case date/time, location, gender, age-group, disease, and syndrome. However, it was not designed to address the standard operating procedures of the legally mandated surveillance and notification.

Now the RTBP project is looking for external funding to enhance the RTBP developed mHealthSurvey mobile phone software to adapt to the functional requirements of the Sentinel Site Surveillance program. This would require adding some logic in to the mHealthSurvey or other to capture the H544 attribute information if the patient record is a notifiable disease. One option we are looking at is using OpenRosa XForm technology to make this adjustment.

Crowdsourcing emergency information over HF spectrum data platform

2010-03-05T20:29:00.012+08:00

It's been over 6 months since I've been looking for a potential funding agency to support our concept on field testing transmission of data of the High Frequency spectrum. Overall the benefits of the system is to support Emergency Communication before and after disasters when terrestrial networks are down and congested.

Part of the concept, namely the alerting component, was proven in the lab and a video of Sahana CAP alert issued over HF data can be viewed on YouTube.

At present we have the buy in from the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), Telecommunication s Authority of Maldives, and Telecommunication Regu latory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL). Also other partners such as National Disaster Management Centers and Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies. These three nodes allows us to test the network over long, medium, and short range transmissions to evaluate the performance. Moreover, evaluate the practicalities of the applications in a given domain and environment.

I think the problem with the proposal is that it does not address the touchy feely social aspect to the research where donors who actually get money from tax payers or from Philanthropist, then like to give money to those projects that make them feel like they helped a poor person to feel good about themselves and that they would have a better after life. Perhaps this project falls more in line with a pure engineering or science project. The gist of it is that the technology is geared for Disaster Management and saving lives.

Idea is to provide a platform for crowdsourcing when all other technologies are ill-fated; where mobile hand held terminal devices, in the absence of their connection to the network, can still be used as a storage device for images, sound bites, or text that are vital ground information, then use the HF data platform to communicate that life saving information to far away central crisis management centers to optimally allocate resources to maximize the benefits.

The technology has the potential to leverage an untapped set of skilled communications experts; namely the Ham radio operators, to assist their governments in providing communications. Setting up HF stations is as simple as stringing wires between trees or hoisting a pole for the antenna then fixing it to a portable HF radio with a laptop and Pactor Modem. This simple setup (to mention with free air time) can provide the data streaming for chat, email, Situation-Report, Situational-Awareness/Alert applications.

This Figure shows the different circumstances the platform can operate in such as providing secured and unsecured transmissions for chat, email, Situation-Report, Situational-Awareness/Alert application during pre and post disaster crisis windows over short, medium, and long distances.

We'll keep trying until someone realizes the true potential of this uncommercialized network technology that can aid in humanitarian efforts.

Knight Foundation selects Citizen Journalism via Mobile Services concept

2010-01-02T22:38:00.006+08:00

Each year the Knight News Challenge Contest funds innovative projects that couple media with information communication technology that empowers local communities. The Mobile Service Platform (MSP) revenue share model for Citizen Journalism was selected for the second round to submit a proposal for the 2010 Knight News Challenge. The timing couldn't have been any better. I'm really excited in making this happen. The project partners are - Lanka Jathika Sarvodaya Society, Center for Policy Alternatives, Uniphore, Rural Technology and Business Incubator, Internews, and LIRNEasia.

Emergency communication over Radio Data System proposed to ISIF Asia

2009-11-02T23:13:00.006+08:00

I put in a proposal to the 2010 Information Society Innovation Fund - on the concept of extending the information, usually easily available over the Internet, through Radio Data System (RDS) platform; specifically, communicating emergency information over RDS. It is a very small grant and the chances of getting selected are very slim (i.e. chance of 1 out of 20).

Sahana HF data platform for alert and situation reports

2009-06-23T04:10:00.003+08:00

On my way to the IDRC meeting in Penang I spent two days with Prof. Ahmad Zuri et al in Cyberjaya, Malaysia evaluating the Sahana Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) messaging over HF spectrum data platform. Prof. Zuri's team through, a grant from the Malaysia Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) and the support from Mr. Zolkhonain Norizan and Mohd Aris Bernawi of MCMC, a prototype of the transport and application layers were developed by June 2009.

The lab setup was replicated at MCMC with two HF radios connected to two laptops through Pactor II modems; one acting as the remote client and the other as the IP-HF gateway transforming the HF data to the Internet. A third laptop was hosting Sahana on the LAMP stack. A CAP message sent through Sahana could is first received by the IP-HF gateway, which resolves the string and relays it to the remote station transported as HF data.

Other than a few flood incidences, Malaysia (MY) is perhaps one of the least disaster prone country in the Asia-Pacific. With that in mind, the idea is to setup a hub in MY to transport Sahana specific emergency information through the HF spectrum. As of now, Maldives, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka have agreed to pilot this system. We await hope a Pacific Island or New Zealand may join the consortium. Proposal is in the working to seek funding.

A short video demonstrating the concept

Now a member of Sahana Project Management Committee

2009-04-02T23:32:00.004+08:00

The Sahana community included me as a Project Management Committee (PMC) member. My work with Sahana is in the early warning space with the development of the biosurveillance module and the messaging module.

The first Sahana conference took place in Colombo, Sri Lanka during the last week of March, 2009. I made two presentations (biosurveillance and common alerting protocol) and Prof. Samarajiva one (public warning), which stated our (LIRNEasia's) commitment to Sahana.

Sahana has divested from the original parent Lanka Software Foundation and has been incorporated as a foundation in the state of California, USA. Work is still in progress in establishing the foundation.

SMS Transport for GSoC 2009

2009-03-14T08:57:00.000+08:00

It is my first time volunteering to mentor students for the Google Summer of Code 2009. The Sahana Free and Open Source Software community has been taking part in GSoC since 2007. This year Google has offered 10 slots to begin with; meaning 10 student will be provided summer funding to develop code for Sahana. There were 34 applicants with project ideas for Sahana.

One of my initial ideas had been to develop a SMS transport that mimics IP where data can be exchanged between a mobile client and a server (database). This is to address the problem faced by emergency coordinators in communicating field data to central levels and receiving information during the response stage of a crisis. Network congestion is a fact during the peak or initial stages of a crisis. Hence, voice channels are the first to shut down. Other means such as GPRS signals are not always up to par and in most cases would be weak in covering remote location that are in the periphery of the footprint of cellular towers. However, SMS that works on weak signal strength, a store-and-forward communication technology, even though may not send the information in real time, would eventually get the data across to the terminal devices.

Presently Sahana, a web browser application, reliant on Internet connectivity for data exchange, is developing a class of mobile phone and personal data assistant hand-held device applications to operate in the field. These hand-held devices are handy effective tools in data collection and reception. Although GPRS exists as means for providing connectivity, given the question on reliability, it is important that a redundant or alternate channel for transferring information is in place, if Sahana applications are to be effective across available communication network platforms.

The problem that this project promises to solve is to develop an SMS transport layer that can communicate with the Sahana applications during times of need. This proposal outlines the goals and design of the envisaged software object that will work as a general protocol to support all Sahana modules for networking with hand-held terminal device applications.

The Sahana community has definitely selected the student who has provided some original ideas and proven skills to develop the client and server side components. Some aspects that the developer must keep in mind are compressing the strings to minimze on SMS tariffs are multifold relative to GPRS, sequencing the SMS pages to ensure they are chained back at both server and client sides. Some thoughts such as use of binary XML has been suggested to structure the server calls or client requests and data exchange between the Sahana clients and Sahana servers.

I'm excited to mentor the student in developing this component as part of GSoC2009 for Sahana.

Common Alerting Protocol messages over Radio Data System

2009-02-27T22:37:00.007+08:00

In several blogs I've mentioned my work in relation to Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) a standard that is being absorbed by emergency communicators for exchanging situational reports in relation to natural and man-made threats. Past month I was in Sri Lanka, predominantly, attending to field work on the real-time biosurveillance program, my current ongoing project, which is using CAP for issuing health alerts (situational reports) to health workers. During this visit I was invited by CEL Lanka to review their home brewed Radio Data System (RDS) for issuing text alerts over FM radio waves.

The RDS for alerting comprises a special FM radio developed by CEL Lanka that can receive text to display as well as turn on an audible siren according to a priority level, a larger LCD display to be assemble in public spots such as bus stations, road side, trains, etc, and a software module to communicate with the encoder for generating text messages in Sinhala, Tamil, and English languages. This project had been funded by the Information Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) under a small grant. CEL Lanka has produced 40 of the LCD units to be deployed in location around the Island.

I recommended that the system incorporate CAP for value addition; more so for being CAP compliant to receive a CAP message and automatically feed the required data to the RDS text element. This way the system can be easily plugged in to any existing Disaster Communication Software system without too many changes such as a P2P CAP Broker. Similar to SMS alerts or Email alerts one can include RDS as another medium for receiving alerts.

CEL Lanka is interested in enabling the system with CAP. We will include the RDS as a plug in to the Sahana Messaging Module. Another similar project is the inclusion of a gateway to send and receive text over HF Radios being developed by Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). Respere Lanka developed the SMS/Email engine for issuing text alerts. Respere will come in as a partner to develop the web browser based GUI to trigger CAP alerts to be transported through the RDS.

Similar to SMS, RDS also has limitations on the number of characters that each packet can carry. Concatenation of packets pose the same problem as SMS pages; where packets/pages not arrive in the same sequence they are sent. These are some of the few challenges that lie ahead in delivering this component. Over the next few weeks I will be working on the software architecture and the CAP profile for including the RDS in to the Sahana Messaging Module. We intend to apply for a small grant to produce the remaining components.

Short Messaging and Common Alerting Protocol over HF Spectrum

2008-12-05T00:07:00.006+08:00

Amateur radio operators have played a major role during disasters in providing front line communication when all other technologies have seized to operate. MARTS - Malaysia Amateur Radio Transmitter's Society was in full force sharing their experiences and demonstrating the equipment at the ITU Asia-Pacific Centers of Excellence Training Workshop on Effective Use of Telecommunication/ICT in response to disasters: saving lives. The equipment range from vehicle mounted, hand helds, and nomadic units that work over UHF/VHF/HF frequencies. I had the privilege of presenting the Common Alerting Protocol experience in Sri Lanka to the government delegates from Asia and the Pacific Islands; CAP was unheard of by the delegates.

Another novel project on the use of HF spectrum for communicating short messages (or chat messages) was presented by Prof. Dr. Ahmad Zuri bin Sha'ameri at the same ITU event. It was definitely a product that could be engulfed in to the Sahana suite of Messaging gateways or part of the P2P CAP Broker. Both him and I got off to a good start on agreeing to proceed with the experimental idea of porting his solution on to Sahana. An initial document of the concept and action plan was exchanged within a few days of us returning to our desks.

Most of the officials attending the ITU event were officials from their respective telecom regulatory bodies working on disaster management. They were quite excited of the project we have put on the table and promised to educate their ministers of the possibility of piloting the HF spectrum text messaging modules for emergency communication in their countries.

The first step is to develop the software and prove the concept in Malaysia and/or Sri Lanka. This portion of the project is being funded by the Malaysia Communication and Multimedia Commission. Second step is to write a larger proposal to pilot the working solution in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and few of the Pacific Islands - Nauru, Marshal Islands, Vanuatu, etc.

Optimally transporting XML through SMS for CAP Messages - How can it be done?

2008-11-19T20:26:00.011+08:00

While working on my presentation titled "Common Alerting Protocol" (CAP) for the ITU Workshop in Kedha, Malaysia and experimenting with the Sahana Messaging/Alerting Module in preperation for a demo for the workshop participants, I questioned, "is there a method already in place or how does one optimally send an XML file through the SMS transport. Of cause this is in relation to transporting a CAP message with the underlying XML data storage and transfer standard through the SMS transport technology.

One would say, "why bother with SMS just transport it through GPRS or any other advanced mobile data service platform transport layer. There are advantages that SMS offers and GPRS does not; a key advantage being SMS is always ready to receive messages (i.e. data can be pushed on to) provided the handset is turned on; where as GPRS must be user initiated where the data must be pulled. For the purpose of "alerting" SMS surpasses GPRS with the mentioned advantage. It is also possible to house a an applet that resides on the handset and uses GPRS to periodically fetch newly posted WAP alerts.

Obviousely all one needs to do is insert the XML formatted text including the tags, header, etc in an SMS text and send it to whomever they want. The dilemma is in the payload. The XML formated text in the image above has 520 characters with white space and 421 characters without white space. The 520 characters would fit in to four 8-bit encoded SMS pages. Cost of an SMS is proportional to the number of SMS pages; unlike GPRS which is billed by the number of bytes (or kilobytes). More so, the intent of CAP being mass alerting efficiency is compromized with the size of the payload. Hence the key question is "how do we minimize the payload of a CAP message transported througg SMS to maximize the efficiency and the effectiveness?"

For a targeted application such as one that would display a CAP message could be designed to include only the necessary and sufficient (tags), which are yet to be determined by experts and remain an open problem. Let us assume the CAP SMS text carries the <incident>, <scope>, <status>, <msgType>, <category>, <event>, <urgency>, <severity>, <certainty>, <areaDesc>, and <resourceDesc> tags. The mobile phone application would be designed to read these tags and display on an interactive mobile phone GUI. The GUI would give the recipient the option to change the predefined values such as the <msgType> from the received value of "Alert" to "Ack" and reply to the sender. Assuming the alert was issued through a software such as the Sahana Messaging Module, which has a feature to store replies and produce a consolidated report, sender could match those who had received and acknowledged the alert.

I anticipate the need to transfer XML files on to mobile phones will become a must with standardization and interoperability. The revers or the dual exists; thus XML encoding for SMS. Any one interested can find technical literature on IBM's developer works Tips.

Mobile platform revenue share model for citizen journalism in Sri Lanka

2008-09-11T16:06:00.005+08:00

The research question is "can the mobile service platform revenue sharing model be catalyst to advocating a sustainable citizen journalism program in Sri Lanka?". The previous article on "audio content production and deliver is the first step to instigating citizen journalism" talked about the Sarvodaya initiative to build capacity in rural Sri Lanka for enabling a platform to hear the voices of the rural communities. Given the cost of mobilizing such an endeavor it is best to begin with audio productions.

I'm writing a research proposal that aims to use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system with touch tone and voice through a normal phone call and Podcasts through a website (specifically WAP enabled) over the GSM mobile service platform. IVR would work over the voice channel but the dilemma lies in the Podcasts over GPRS. Given the coverage strengths in Sri Lanka it is debatable whether the Podcasts would work.

As in most cases the emphasis in applied research (or action research), besides answering the system robustness question, is answering the sustainability question. As a result it is hypothesised that a revenue share scheme would advocate for such system to live long. The revenue share model over the content business value chains (Joader, 2007) establishes a proportionate sharing scheme between the content-creators, content-owners, aggregators, vendors, and the network-providers.

There are already aggregators such as Kongregate, Youtube, Digital Journal, etc that provide platforms for content-creators to cash in for their creativity. In Sri Lanka the mobile operators are apprehensive to sharing revenue with service providers. The research intends to partner with a mobile operator such as Dialog Telekom who has the largest mobile market share in Sri Lanka and is investigating ventures that will use their technologies such as delivery of the news paper Lankapuvath over SMS and IVR.

The research design will look at a sample of 10 governing districts in Sri Lanka and through a series of awareness campaigns recruit content-creators and subscribers. Thereafter, let the system determine the survival of the fittest; where the creative, interesting, subscriber centric content-creators will profit from the system and the weaker ones will disappear. The assessment will group the data on the urban/rural divide, language, religious preface, and gender. The publications will be categorized in to current affairs, culture, philosophy, education, and entertainment based on a probability measure distribution; where a publication on the topic of "child primary schooling" may fall into the categories of current affairs and education with a distribution of 0.70 and 0.30, respectively. Both a subjective and objective assessment schemes will be implement to qualitatively and qualitatively assess the evidence of the viability of the technology, human aspects, and policy implications.

Comments are welcome on any literature available in this area, research methodologies, and implementation schemes or even knowledge on other projects of similar nature.

Technical definintion: "early warning system"

2008-08-31T18:18:00.008+08:00

A technical definition for Early Warning Systems (EWS) in hard to find. The work on classification of EWS requires a precise definition for EWS. The wikipedia definition fo EWS is what is quoted by the United Nations, very much human centric with natural disasters in mind. In my opinion EWS and Observer Controller systems have a lot in common (Figure 1). As they both try to predict and correct system's response. However, EWS can be broken down to a chain of systems that are distinctly a chain of communication systems.

Figure 1 Feedback control system model for EWS

I propose the following definition -

Definition "Early Warning System (EWS)": A chain of information communication systems comprising sensor, detection, decision, and broker systems, in the given order, working in conjunction forecasting and signaling disturbances adversely affecting the stability of the physical world, giving sufficient time for the response system to prepare resources and response actions in minimizing the impact on the stability of the physical world.

A paper in relation to the proposed definition as well as an introduction to the necessary and sufficient components can be found in the blog with title: "towards a definintion for EWS".

Audio content production and delivery is the first step to instigating citizen journalism

2008-08-16T21:39:00.012+08:00

Since October 2007, I have been voluntarily engaging in building capacity within Sarvodaya with the intent of mobilizing rural communities in developing local content. If we are to divide content as text, audio, and video, the question is "which one of the mediums do we start with first, in a Sri Lanka?"

We can rule out video based on cost of production and need for professionalism. Similarly, the production and distribution of text; i.e. a newsletter, would be rather costly and would be hard to recover the costs from the subscribers. In general Sri Lankan people are less inclined to reading and writing; i.e. even in a long distance bus one would observe nearly zero people to read a book or a news paper. However, would be apt to listening to the bus radio or even their built in FM radio on the mobile phone. Therefore, Sarvodaya policy was to use audio as a medium to instigate the concept of citizen journalism within its mandate.

My belief is developing audio, which is as simple as pressing the record button and speaking one's mind in to a microphone is far more simpler than electronically composing a story or making a video that is meaningful. Moreover, delivery of audio requires much less bandwidth opposed to video.

The community based audio production and delivery concept was presented to an audience at LIRNEasia by my colleague Chamindha Rajakaruna to get an opinion on the foreseen strategy. The real-time blog on the colloquium titled "Sarvodaya satellite and web radio, a precursor to community-radio, the way forward and challenges" highlights the concept. The colloquium was valuable to us in seeing the way forward; especially in separating the tow intents: 1) Internal closed user group broadcast of content on Sarvodaya philosophy, governance, and activities 2) pure citizen journalism creating a platform for people to voice their opinions and exchange ideas. I have written a comment on the LIRNEasia blog under the same colloquium topic saying that in a country where broadband in rural areas is still in its infancy an alternative broadcast technology and a peer-to-peer technology are both necessary, if Sarvodaya is to achieve intentions 1) & 2).

This community based audio content production and delivery project is a spin off from the past HazInfo project, which concluded the need for both the WorldSpace addressable satellite radios for emergency alerts and Dialog/Microimage Java enabled mobile phones for SMS alerts as the two technologies that could provide complementary redundancy in a closed user group last-mile hazard warning system. While mobile phones have been embraced in to the daily lives of people in Sri Lanka, the WorldSpace satellite radio remains a new and unheard information communication technology in Sri Lanka. Therefore, the greater challenge is developing a sustainable platform for the satellite radios as a technology that is always used. Deshodaya Media Production Unit took on the challenge of developing connect through a community participatory approach to bring life to the channel dedicated to Sarvodaya.

Given that the satellite radio and mobile phone technologies are currently in operation, it is ideal to use these two technologies as basis to test the content production and development processes such that when broadband with internet is widely accessible in rural Sri Lanka, the citizens would have the know how to develop MP3 audio content for exchanging information.

Preliminary work of ealry warning system classification presented

2008-08-02T19:17:00.007+08:00

I was delighted to have had the opportunity of presenting the preliminary outline of the theoretical work towards classifying early warning systems at LIRNEasia's colloquium this past Tuesday. The first proposition presented to the audience was on establishing that the necessary and sufficient components of an EWS being a sensor, detector, decision, broker, and response system. In EWS systems such as sensor and detection are coupled and termed as detection and monitoring. However, the distinction between sensor and detection systems; namely defining the operations, were resolved. The LIRNEasia blog, titled- what are these monkey's doing in our blog, recognizes that theory can and should be used to model response systems. It was clear that the presentation was too long. Best is to break down the presentation in to 3 parts addressing the 3 primary classifiers. LIRNEasia would like me to address the propositions on the LIRNEasia blog to start a discuss, which I will in the near future.

Click here for the slides

Real-time biosurveillance research is off the ground

2008-07-12T21:36:00.012+08:00

The long awaited real-time biosurveillance program pilot project officially began on 11-July-2008. LIRNEasia received a grant from the International Development Research Center to conduct the developmental research project over the next 2 years. I will be working in the capacity of the Project Director.

The first year will be spent on developing the ICT system for disease surveillance and notification. Data will be collected through a J2ME mobile phone application, which would be a direct adoption of the java rosa (a.k.a openROSA) suite of applications or a rendition of it. The analytics algorithms with GUI for detection of disease outbreaks will come from Auton Lab. Very well use Sahana Messaging or SMS Geo-Chats for a feedback/follow-up mechanism with a log for sending and keeping track of alerts.

Second year will be devoted to evaluating the ICT system in a real world setting where the government and community health care workers will use the system as part of their daily routines. A prominent question will be determining the incentives for health care workers in rural settings to participate in a e-Health based programs. We will look at the productivity increase, which will be weighted against a control group who is not exposed to the e-Health based disease surveillance and notification program. Justify issues related some prior studies that have shown effects of manipulation of data - under-reporting or over-reporting - depending on the circumstance. Evaluate the effectiveness of biosurveillance algorithms in detecting disease outbreaks and understanding whether mobile application based data streams can assist in the detection and notification process; as well as the different aspects between the different sides (data collectors, algorithm designers, algorithm implementers, health monitors, program evaluators, etc) in the overall picture.

Some of the initiatives in the same disease surveillance and notification space are the following projects -- Google Predict & Prevent, InSTEDD, Sahana, D-Tree, Dimagi, GATHER, among many others.

Healthcare Worker based mobile Sensor Systems

2008-07-02T02:25:00.008+08:00

The aim of the real time biosurveillance program is to mobilize Healthcare Workers in the rural settings with mobile phones to record and submit patient counts for the purpose of consolidating national health data for surveillance of unusual patterns (headsup). Problem that this real-time biosurveillance program (RTBP) promises to solve is to strengthen existing disease surveillance and detection communication systems, reduce latencies in detecting and communicating disease information, and set a stand interoperable protocol for sharing disease information with national and international health-related organizations in the region.

My role in the RTBP is working in the capacity of a Researcher and Project Director. The grant has been approved by IDRC but the administrative work remains to be completed before funds can be transfered and work can begin

RTBP shares many similarities with the small study working in (somewhat) rural Tanzania focus on guiding health care workers through medical algorithms, with the primary goal of improving care and the secondary goal of collecting data. In particular, it is automated with the IMCI protocols for classifying and treating childhood illness. If you are interested, an online paper titled "e-IMCI: Improving Pediatric Health Care in Low-Income Countries" describes the project and lessons learned.

The design of RTBP using mobile phones is in par with this abstract from the IEEE Internet Computing article titled - The Rise of People-Centric Sensing - "Technological advances in sensing, computation, storage, and communications will turn the near-ubiquitous mobile phone into a global mobile sensing device. People-centric sensing will help drive this trend by enabling a different way to sense, learn, visualize, and share information about ourselves, friends, communities, the way we live, and the world we live in. It juxtaposes the traditional view of mesh sensor networks with one in which people, carrying mobile devices, enable opportunistic sensing coverage. In the MetroSense Project's vision of people-centric sensing, users are the key architectural system component, enabling a host of new application areas such as personal, public, and social sensing."

Gov of India slides - ICT Disaster Risk Reduction

2008-06-16T10:32:00.001+08:00

Ict In Disaster Risk Reduction India Case

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QR Codes for Health Information Exchange

2008-06-12T08:11:00.000+08:00

Yesterday night's skype meeting with Gordon Gow brought forth the idea of using QR codes to code and decode health information in relation to the next research in many aspects, a research him and I plan to start shortly; i.e. the RTBP. Refer to his blog for a note on QR Codes and application for mobile phones for emergency managers - Barcodes meet cellphones: intriguing possibilities.

The Real-Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) is a research that envisions pilot testing mobile phones for collecting health-related information and applying AutonLab's suite of statistical data mining algorithms for fetching anomalies in the health datasets. The Healthcare-Workers will be provided with mobile phones and a Java application, a rendition of openROSA suit of applications. Indian Institute of Technology - Madras will be developing the mobile applications.

The health information will be mostly patient counts with similar symptoms. We discussed the possibility of using QR codes during transport and storage of information:

1) the Healthcare-Worker recorded data on the mobile handhelds can be encoded as a QR Code prior to transmitting the information to central repository (database). Since the QR Codes use the Reed-Solomon error correction method the misinterpretation of health information during transport and storage is further reduced

2) Given, that a QR codes are already encoded in binary form, the possibility of increasing the speed of the statistical data mining algorithms are worth testing

3) encoding communicable diseases and other known diseases with symptoms in QR Code form printed as hard copy for Healthcare Workers to use for entering information by simply scanning the QR code with the mobile phone camera instead of typing the lengthy string with the possibility of misspelling

4) In the event the Java application residing on the handheld fails the Healthcare Workers can use the hard copy QR code version to scan predefined health information strings to record the information on the handheld, then use Email, MMS or SMS to transit the information over any technology that allows the standard Email, SMS, MMS applications, making it easier for the database to also decipher and parse the information before storing in the relevant attributes (fields)

5) The Healthcare Workers can store the patient information in QR Code form as a hardcopy as a backup. Since it is in a human unreadable form the possibility of an unauthorized random individual reading the confidential patient information is null

These are thoughts that came up during our discussion and look forward to testing the concepts with the RTBP.

Attempt to Classify Early Warning Systems

2008-06-11T11:52:00.000+08:00

Over the past 2 months, since my work completed as the researcher/project manager evaluating a last-mile hazard information dissemination research, a contract received through LIRNEasia, I've been taking a stab at classifying early warning systems (EWS). The research so far does not reveal a concrete abstraction for this classification effort. Most of the work done are domain specific, thus financial specialist trying to classify financial EWS, engineers trying to classify engineering EWS, so on and so forth.

The question that pops in my mind is "how does one distinguish between two similar EWS designs for the same purpose; i.e. pick the best?" or "how does one enumerate the capability and capacity of a given EWS?" or "how does one decompose an existing design to depict the possibility of adding on to extend the value to service other risks?" Current thinking is to design systems to the decision makers liking. Also there is no regard for including response systems in the design. As I see a EWS designed without taking the "customer attribute"; i.e. the response system in to consideration, is like throwing darts in to an empty space; i.e. no target.

The works so far leads me to believe that three main parameters that can classify any EWS, whether it be natural (as in the animal kingdom), engineered, social, or economic, are by understanding them through observer-controller (predictor corrector) systems, complexity theory, and Markov processes. These three primary fields give us the tools to define the operational orientations, capabilities of the design, and the expected capacity in real conditions.

I am testing the above mentioned framework on four examples: community-based last-mile hazard warning system (I was personally involved in), debt crisis financial EWS, Dam failure (safety) EWS, and a EWS based on the Traceability of Agriculture markets. The classification scheme inclusive of the enumeration theories are working in my favor. Although the exact simulated values for the system design capabilities and expect capacity are yet to be determined.

I would greatly appreciate anyone working in the same arena or has any interest in discussing the aspects of solving this classification problem to share their opinions with me through dialog.

Hunting for 1 of the 208 Olympic Torches in Kunming

2008-06-10T08:57:00.000+08:00

Monday morning I was extremely excited to see the 2008 Olympic torch come through Kunming. This would be a one time offering of the Olympic torch to come through the city I currently live in, and the probabilistically, them same happening in my life time would be near zero. The previous night my nephew got details of the official route off the web. It was to start from the famous Stone Forest (World Heritage site) at 8:30am and make its way in to the city. We decided to catch a glimpse of it at Green Lake Park. Once we got there we found out that the route had been changed and was not going the long distance as planned. I suppose the organizers fear the Dalai Clan would cause problems, Yunnan being the closest province and the beginning of the to Tibetan plateau. My wife got tired of trekking around the city hunting for the torch and decided to spend her time shopping; while my nephew and I decided to continue the hunt. It was 11am and we thought we could catch the afternoon session near the Expo Village at 1:00pm. Riding the bus along Beijing Lu (road) we saw hordes of fans gathered at Dong Feng Square. We were convinced, with the amount of people gathered as well as the police presence, the torch was bound to come through the square; hopped off the bus. Then to our disappointment we learned that of the 208 torch exchanges that were to happen in Kunming, already 200 had been completed. The event that was to last the entire day ended in the morning. The city had issued special invitations to big shots and there henchmen to attend, leaving the general public out. I guess the Olympics are not for the ordinary but for the class that the ordinary don't belong!

P2P CAP Broker for Communicating Cyclones/Hurricanes

2008-06-04T19:19:00.000+08:00

A proposal was submitted for an NSF grant on Communicating Hurricane Warnings. This a two country research collaboration between the iSchool @ UMD and LSF @ UCSC. I will work with LSF as a Principle Investigator in the capacity of an OR Analyst/Project Manager in managing and conducting the Sri Lankan research component. Dave Yates from the iSchool will conduct the parallel research in USA.

The research will develop a Peer-to-Peer Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Broker for exchanging hurricane/cyclone information with stakeholders such as the Met dept, Broadcasters, First-Responders, Citizens, and other associates. The P2P CAP Broker will be a FOSS application amalgamated in to the Sahana suite of Disaster Management software modules. The intent of the P2P CAP Broker is to provide a plat form for stakeholders to network in the same way as a "social network" to exchange cyclone/hurricane information before, during, and after an incident.

A major component will be testing the CAP interoperability structure for communicating information in multiple languages; Sinhala/Tamil in Sri Lanka and English/Spanish in USA. The software will be accessible via mobile handhelds and laptop/desktop computers via the internet. The alerting component will work on SMS too. The National Weather Bureau (Met dept) could issue alerts to first-responders downstream and receive acknowledgments from alert recipients up stream. Users who are part of the network could also send situational reports upstream to the central authorities. The figure above shows the schematics of the proposed system.

The P2P CAP Broker was a recommendation made in the HazInfo research technical report. As we had encountered in the real life experiences as well as in the HazInfo research, it is usually the people and protocols that fail and not the technologies. Therefore, the proposed research of evaluating the P2P exchange of cyclone/hurricane information intends to measure the uncertainties caused due to technological and organizational complexities of this system through evidential analysis.

If the grant is approved work should begin in January 2009 and end in 2011. The first year will be dedicated to research and development of the ICT system and the second year for evaluation through mock-drills and the use during the cyclone/hurricane seasons in Sri Lanka and USA.

Food Crisis in Sri Lanka and the World

2008-06-01T20:10:00.000+08:00

"Global Food Crisis and the local Rice Prices"

This newspaper article was written by my father Dr. Parakrama Waidyanatha and was published in the Sunday Observer - http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2008/06/01/fea11.asp .... worth a read.

Especially quotes such as (extracted directly from article) --
:: Over a 100 million poor who spend 50 - 70% of their earnings on food
:: Food prices have risen by 83% globally over the last three years
:: U.S is diverting an amount equivalent to its entire export volume of corn for biofuel
:: farmgate price of paddy is an all time high, but the cost of production is relatively low
:: the heavy fertilizer subsidy of about 400% of the actual cost

more

Sichuan Earthquake - Noteworthy

2008-05-31T11:06:00.000+08:00

Noteworthy article on the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake:

NPR Chendu Diary

Fano Matroid is Spot-on

2008-04-20T16:32:00.004+08:00

In this blog I give reasons for choosing a rendition of the fano matroid as the logo for Spot-on Solution, as shown in this image.

The fano matroid is named after Gino Fano, a mathematician who devoted his life to projective and algebraic geometry. The fano matroid is also referred to as the fano plane, projective geometry P(2,2), steiner tipple system S(2,3,7).

During my foundation in operations research at the University of Montana, I was introduced to all three of the notions associated with the algebraic structure comprising 7 vertices and seven edges. When a cube with 8 vertices and 8 edges (3 dimensional object) is projected on to a plane (2 dimensional space) it produces the fano plane. In block design theory the steiner triple system S(2,3,7) when represented as a graph, resembles the fano plane. In matroid theory the fano matroid plays a significant role as what is termed as an excluded minor in differentiating properties of certain classes of matroids.

My masters thesis was on defining the notion of circuit double covers for matroids and developing a few algorithms to create matroids with circuit double covers in several classes of matroids such as the uniform matroid, graphic matroids, ternary matroids, binary matroid, etc. The notion of circuit double covers had already been established for graphs in graphs theory by Seymour and Szekeres, in 1970. This conjecture, the cycle double covers for graphs, remains an open problem to this day. I first came across the notion of cycle double covers of graphs when attending the 1998 Bigsky conference on Discrete Mathematics, hosted by the University of Montana Mathematics Department. My adviser, Prof. Jenny McNulty, handed me the challenge of understanding circuit double covers of matroids, which was a pioneering topic. That's when I fell in love with the fano matroid, which is now my favorite abstract structure, where 23 is my favorite number.

With this I have chosen a rendition of the fano matroid as my Spot On Solution's logo. As seen in the image above, the warped version is due to many reasons. Given that my current focus on systems, specifically, Information Communication Systems (ICT), the idea of stability is a major criteria that all those who deal with systems hard to establish. Although perfection cannot be achieved, designers of systems, strive to achieve, at least, an asymptotic or near perfection, of stability. The lines (or edges of the fano matroid) in the logo resemble the transient and steady state response of a system arriving at some asymptotic stability (looking like an exponential function). Moreover, no matter at which "state" (vertex on the fano matroid) one starts it is possible to traverse to any other point with one hop (passing through one vertex).

In ICT redundancy is a word that is commonly used as well as an action that is commonly practiced. A double covering in graph theory or matroid theory is synonymous with redundancy. Remarkably the fano matroid is beyond a double covering and is a triple covering per say; where each node has 3 edges descending upon it. With respect to ICT we can think of it as each node is connected to 3 independent channels or links; thus disruption of one link does not effect the operation of any of the nodes; as a matter of fact each node can afford to lose 2 links and still be able to communicate with the other nodes.

Credit has to be given to Absoulte Einsteins for creating the first cut of the logo and Dacia Closson, my friend with exceptional graphic and web design capabilities, for completing the logo.

Encounter with a Consilience theorist at IGIA

2007-12-26T14:34:00.000+08:00

While waiting in line to pass through immigration at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, in Delhi, India, on my way home to Colombo, I met Marc Ragsdale, a fellow working on his version of TOE or on Consilience. He had spent 4 years in India traveling, learning, and working on his theory. A citizen from Oregon, USA and was returning home for christmas to surprise his parents. We exchanged some notes on our theoretical ideas in the cafe sipping on Coca Cola.

I had working experience with the Simple Hierarchical Ordered Planner (SHOP), which uses the concepts of 'atoms' to define axioms, operations, and methods to construct a domain and uses states and tasks to construct a problem in the efforts to formulate and solve assignment problems. The concept of atoms extends to system of systems.

I was not able to get a clear picture of Marc's work, perhaps the paragraph below explains why. My thinking was - missing the element of applied experience and simply lingering in the purerist domain may be the dilemma.

Extract from an email he sent me - "As for my work, I am looking forward to getting together a general primer this upcoming year. Though I have been developing the core principles for the past six years they have led to such divergent conclusions that I was often at a loss as to consolidation. Even to this day the topics I touch upon range greatly, from systems organization to political science and physical theory, and though I know that someday they will aggregate into a common framework, it could be be some time before that happens. Nowadays I seem to be focusing more on social and political elements..."

Since then we've exchanged a few notes, I wish him well and success in his work.

About Spot On Solutions

2007-12-05T18:26:00.007+08:00

Order is fundamental to the process of measurement: representing objects by numbers presuppose we can arrange them in order - Peter J. Cameron

Spot on Solutions (Private) Limited (abbreviated as Spot-on) is a company incorporated under the Government of Sri Lanka Department of Registration of Companies Act no 17. Spot-on work initiated in April 2005 out of my home in Mount Lavinia. A lab was setup on December of 2005 in the Amsler building at No 25 Rotunda Gardens, Colombo 03 with 3 software engineers and myself doing the work. The lab was later shifted to 42 Deseram road, Mount Lavinia in March of 2006 and continued to function there for 14 months until May 2007. Now Spot On functions on the basis of a virtual organization working out of Kunming, China.

Spot-on aims to provide affordable technology solutions for progressive enterprises. Today's world requires organizations to be at the top of their game. Planning is one of the most vital aspects in keeping cost and wasted resources down.

The first work of Spot-on was developing an innovative optimization tool for the purpose services planning; hence the acronym SPOT - Service Plan Optimization Tool, which was absorbed in to the company's name. Moreover, planning solutions must be precisely on-the-dot, i.e. Spot-on: an age old Sinhales (Sri Lankan language) phrase insinuating the same - "thi-tha-ta we-de".

Spot-on has now diversified in to the arena of Information Communication Technology (ICT) with an aim of designing affordable ICT solutions, pilot testing the solutions, and conducting operations research analysis on the pilot system in collaboration with national and international partners for the purpose of public sector ICT policy research.