Monday, July, 20th, 2015 Events
A recently published TakePart article, “An App to Help Escape Rising Seas”, highlights the Boston Climathon, an event hosted at Tufts University’s Medford Campus by the Tufts Institute of the Environment as part of the international 24-hour Climathon challenge organized by EU initiative Climate-KIC. On June 18, coders in 19 cities from Bogotá, Colombia, to Beijing worked around the clock to devise data-driven tech solutions to climate change.
Each city tasked its participants with responding to a climate-related challenge. While Londoners took on air pollution, Boston organizers asked participants to come up with tools that would help residents adapt to the risk of sea-level rise and flooding during storm surges.
In Boston, former risk analyst Nissia Sabri and her team developed the idea for uFlood, a Web platform and mobile app to generate turn-by-turn evacuation routes in the metropolitan area. Because many of those who live in the low-lying areas of the city’s eastern edge may not be proficient in English, the team decided to convey directions visually.
Because people aren’t usually motivated to plan for disasters they haven’t experienced, Sabri’s team hopes to incorporate virtual reality in uFlood—which will tap weather data—to show what the water level will look like in any given area for approaching storms.
“We wanted something that would attract people and make them curious to use it before they needed it,” Sabri, an engineer and an MIT graduate student, said. “And people are interested in games and virtual reality—that’s the hook to get people thinking about it.”
While O’Donnell-Hoare’s team—which included developers from AMEE and IBM and a particle physicist—finished their winning project in just eight hours, Sabri’s will require more money and time to become a functioning app.
As one of Boston’s winning teams, uFlood—along with the other cities’ winners—will receive mentorship and support to bring the app online, and one final team will be chosen show the fruits of their labor in December at the international climate change negotiations in Paris.
(Text is adapted from TakePart.com article “An App to Help Escape Rising Seas”.)