Program

The study of crises and their management has been the subject of research for many years. In France, already in 1976, E. Morin was calling for a theory of crisis, a common basis for sectoral, multi-sectoral or interdisciplinary research. While the Anglo-Saxon literature often indifferently uses emergency, crisis and disaster, global warming, as a latent crisis whose local manifestations are increasingly recurrent and violent, leads us to return to the distinction between crisis and disaster, in the sense of major events (Thom, 1976), to better rethink both its processes as a concept and its occurrences in the field, as objects of empirical study.
In France, each summer fires in previously unaffected areas and the difficulty of containing them, as well as the occurrence of extreme weather events and their consequences for populations such as major flooding or cyclones, are illustrations of risks described as “emerging” by civil security actors. In South-East Asia, such as Indonesia and Vietnam, meteorological events (typhoons, floods) are also leading these countries to rethink risk prevention and crisis communication.
In this context, the recurrence and violence of this type of risks, exacerbated by global warming, require to work on both ‘breaking within risk and crisis management’ and adapting professional and public practices to deal with it. In this keynote, I will present and discuss a synthesis of several research projects focusing on community resilience and a transdisciplinary approach to foster it in specific and localized territory. This approach focuses on interactions between risk and crisis management stakeholders including local population.

A disaster is the impact and damage to our lives caused by unexpected events beyond human understanding. While there are various ways of looking at disaster phenomena, there are unchanging causal relationships. Information collected about individual phenomena can be integrated by using a common representation.
Is this common representation possible?
Will new technology surpass the disaster prevention capabilities of living organisms, which are able to rationally process large amounts of data simultaneously?
Will humans continue to create ruins?
I would like to look back on my research, which attempted to apply information processing to disaster prevention, and share my thoughts on future research.

Shigeru Kakumoto received his B.Sc. and B.Eng. from Osaka University in 1970 and 1972, respectively and his Ph.D from Kyoto University in 2002. he was a Chief Researcher at the Central Research Laboratory of Hitachi, Ltd., a researcher at EDM-Kawasaki Laboratory (KEDM), National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED), a Visiting Assistant Professor at Kyoto University, and a Specially Appointed Associate Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology.
His current research focuses on the advancement of spatiotemporal information processing and its application to disaster prevention. He also contemplates topics such as the relationship between disasters and human society, and biological evolution and the Earth/space environment.
From 1970 to 1990, he engaged in pioneering work on geographic information processing, including automated map reading, map editing, stereoscopic terrain analysis, and vehicle-based applications. In 1992, during the Unzen-Fugendake pyroclastic flow disaster, he applied 3D terrain analysis for field command support. Following the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, he provided administrative support for recovery in Nagata Ward of Kobe City. Since 1995, Dr. Kakumoto has proposed and developed spatio-temporal information systems, leading to the creation and expansion of DiMSIS-Ex. He also contributed internationally, supporting post-disaster recovery following the 1999 Düzce earthquake in Turkey. From 2002 to 2011, he played a central role in Japan’s large-scale research initiatives, including the “National Research Project for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation” and the “Science and Technology Project for a Safe and Secure Society.” Between 2004 and 2006, he worked on administrative support for municipalities affected by the Niigata Chuetsu Earthquake.

Epidemic modelling has drastically changed the emergency response actions to actual outbreak. Pronounced advancement in predictability has been observed over decades, but enormous improvements were made during and after the course of COVID-19 pandemic. First, a silent innovation that has happened in monitoring the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 is featured by improved predictability of the effective reproduction number, Rt. Using the de-facto population size via Bluetooth or GPS-based location data, the time trend of Rt became sufficiently traceable. Second, human mobility data via the same location-based information were monitored on daily basis, enabling to describe the inter-regional spread of epidemic in real time. Third, importance of tracing susceptibles has been featured by statistical estimation of the immune landscape at the population level. Even after relaxing interventions and data collection effort, immune landscape was shown to be quantifiable via serial cross-sectional surveys. Now it has become possible to objectively interpret the epidemiological mechanisms of transmission behind observed data in real time, and future policymaking will face a need to transparently confront with such datasets in designing countermeasures.

Hiroshi Nishiura was born in Osaka in 1977. Dr. Hiroshi Nishiura received his M.D. in Medicine from Miyazaki Medical College (presently University of Miyazaki School of Medicine) and Ph.D. from Hiroshima University Graduate School of Health Sciences. After graduation, he gained extensive research and teaching experience at Imperial College London, University of Tuebingen, University of Utrecht, Nagasaki University Institute of Tropical Medicine, and the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Nishiura served as associate professor at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Medicine from 2013, professor at Hokkaido University Graduate School of Medicine from 2016 and has been a professor at Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine since August 2020. His speciality is the analysis of epidemic data using mathematical models of infectious diseases. He has been working on epidemic data analysis for the Novel Coronavirus Response Headquarters team at the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.