2007: "Demonstration of Sahana: Free and Open Source Disaster Management", M. Careem, R. De Silva, L. Rachid, S. Weerawarana, C. De Silva
was accepted for 8th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research [http://www.dgsociety.org/].
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/s/Silva:Ravindra_De.html
The abstract is as follows:
Sahana is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) application that aims to provide a comprehensive solution for information management in relief operations, recovery and rehabilitation to bring on the efficiencies and effectiveness.
Sahana phase 1 was officially used by the Center for National Operations in Sri Lanka as a part of their official portal in 2005. It was also deployed by the Pakistan government during the 2005 Kashmir/Pakistan earthquake. Sahana phase 2 was deployed to manage major disasters, along with some pre-deployments. These include the Guinsaugon landslides in the Philippines (2006), and the Jogjakarta Earthquake in Indonesia 2006, for which Sahana was deployed for information management in relief operations.
Within 2 years of its inception, Sahana has gained much support and recognition, including the following awards:Sourceforge Project of the Month, June 2006; Google Summer of Code, 2006; Sand Hill Good Samaritan Award, 2006;Finalist, Stockholm Challenge, 2006.
In this demonstration presentation, we first discuss the functional modules of Sahana and the underlying technology framework. We then describe features to make Sahana customizable.
2007: "Geographical Information Systems in Disaster Management", M. Careem, D. Bitner, R. de Silva
was accepted for ISCRAM 2007 [http://iscram.org/], The conference on Intelligent Human Computer Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Under the Geographic Information Science and Crisis Management session. The abstract is as follows:
Disaster Management often involves using Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to manage large amounts of data efficiently. Data during a disaster are often related to geographic features or spatial data, thus requiring special forms of data management software to utilize and manage them efficiently. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are specialized database systems with software that can analyze and display data using digitized maps and tables for decision making. Preparing and correctly formatting data for use in a GIS is nontrivial, and it is even more challenging during disasters because of tight time constraints and inherent unpredictability of many natural disasters. This paper describes the important role of a GIS in disaster management, and discusses the most common characteristics of GIS and their potential use in disaster response. We follow up with a detailed description of the GIS prototype in the Sahana Disaster Management System.
2007: Presented “Sahana” at Open Source Health Care Alliance (OSHCA) 2007 Conference in Malaysia.
2007: was an invited trainer/speaker at Philippine Sahana Initiative (PSI) organized by Bluepoint Foundation and the Saudi Investment Group and Marketing (SIGMA), in cooperation with the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) of Philippines.
2007: was awarded a fellowship by UNDP to attend Asia Source II in Indonesia organized by International Open Source Network (IOSN). I was a facilitator of the Information Management track.
2006: "Sahana: An overview of a Disaster Management System", M. Careem, R. De Silva, L. Rachid, S. Weerawarana, C. De Silva
was accepted for 2nd nternational Conference on Information and Automation, and available in IEEE Xplore.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4250242&isnumber=4250171
Large scale disasters bring together a diversity of organizations and produce massive amounts of heterogeneous data that must be managed by these organizations.
The lack of effective ICT solutions can lead to a lack of coordination and chaos among these organizations, as they track victims' needs and respond to the disaster.
The result can be delayed or ineffective response, the potential wastage of pledged support,imbalances in aid distribution, and a lack of transparency. ICT solutions to manage disasters can potentially improve fficiency and effectiveness.
Sahana is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) application
that aims to be a comprehensive solution for information management in relief operations, recovery and rehabilitation.
This paper addresses the alignment between FOSS development
and humanitarian applications.it then describes the anatomy of the Sahana system.We follow up with a case study of Sahana deployment and lessons learned.
2006: participated in "Disaster Management Workshop" in New York, USA organized by IBM on invitation.
2006: was awarded a fellowship at 8th APNG camp in Singapore and presented "Sahana" at National University of Singapore.
2006: "Sahana (Free and Open Source Web Based Disaster Management System) Development Based on LAMP Stack" , a short paper was accepted and published at Asia Pacific Information Infrastructure Workshop 2006 on July 18, 2006 at National University of Singapore.
2004: "The Universal Biometric System", the final year project research paper was presented at the"6th international information technology conference" under the Computational Intelligence category in 2004.12.01. ISBN: 955-8974-01-3.
Check out the project website done in 2004
http://www.cse.mrt.ac.lk/~ravi/
The abstract is as follows: You can download the fullpaper from DOWNLOAD section.
The Universal Biometric System is a biometric enabled third-party authentication system. It tries to address most of the major issues faced by current biometric industry. This paper describes a system that hides all the complexities of biometrics and provides biometric technology, vendor and platform independent authentication.
It also introduces two novel ideas:
many-to-many mapping reduces the Total Cost of ownership (TCO) while Device-Hierarchy enforces in- depth security.
It achieves biometric vendor, technology and platform independence through the BioAPI specification (the Defacto standard for Biometrics). However it sets it sights far beyond the BioAPI. The system is able to overcome the issues relating to integration of biometrics in an enterprise level network which is one of the biggest problems faced by the biometric industry. It is also designed to provide a simple development environment that does not require complex data structures, pointers and memory management inherent to the BioAPI. This is a Proof of concept effort.
