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- [00:00]
A
Entitled an app that can save lives, brought by lse works and the lse complexity group. Our speakers tonight, we have three, we have a panel. Are our very own Eve Mittelton Kelly, who is founder and director of the Complexity Research Program at LSE and perhaps also most importantly, member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems. Professor Middleton Kelly has worked previously in government and for since 1988, she has been an academic at the London School of Economics. She's a policy advisor in Europe and the USA to the European Commission to several UK government departments, and scientific advisors to the government of Australia, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, Singapore and so on. She's developed a theory of complex social systems and an integrated methodology using both quantitative and qualitative tools and methods, and this theory is being used in teaching at universities around the world. Eve will be our first speaker. She will then be followed by Dr. Paul Lukovic, who is scientific lead of the EU project Socionical and Scientific Director of Embedded Intelligence, German Research center for Artificial Intelligence in Germany. And our final speaker tonight, who will be taking a policy maker's perspective, is Nestor Alfonso Santa Maria. Nestor is a lead in Business resilience for the City of London Corporation where he's part of the Security and Contingency Planning Group. Educated in Venezuela, he has experience that includes working with business protection with responsibility for business continuity, risk governance and information security for both HM Government and in other fields such as political risk analysis, violence prevention abroad. Nesta's work with international organizations in Latin America included helping communities deal with complex emergencies such as refugee crises complicated by flooding and human infectious disease outbreaks. Our three speakers are going to talk for about an hour. We have a detailed presentation and then there will be the opportunity for questions from the floor and there will be discussion across the panelists. So there will be an opportunity to engage with the work, but there's quite a lot to get through. So without further ado, can I open the session by inviting Eve to give her presentation? Thank you very much.
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B
What I would like to do is first of all to give you an outline of the socionic old European project, because all the work that we've done in this particular app that we will be talking about has in fact been developed as part of that project. So I'll give you a very brief outline of that, but I will focus very much on also the four different contexts within which it could be used. Then it will be the science behind the app will be provided by Paul and Nesta. Policymaker's Perspective socionical is a four year European project funded by the Future Emerging Technologies, 14 partners in 10 different countries. What the project has been funded to do is to look at evacuation following an emergency, but also at traffic flows. Now, the whole point is ambient intelligence technology to facilitate evacuation and traffic. This is where the app comes in, because your mobile phone is an ambient intelligence device. And Paul will in fact tell you all about that. But also is underpinned by complexity theory, which is where the LSE Complexity Research Group comes in. Because we've developed a theory of complex social systems, an integrated methodology. What our work is is to address apparently intractable problems by identifying the multidimensional problem space and creating what we call endogenous enabling environments that co evolve with a changing exogenous external environment. Now, we will not be talking about this. All I want to do here is to give you a little bit of context before we go onto the app. And the whole thing of course, is based on an analysis using the principles of complexity. These are some of the principles on the right. The main one I want you to look at is creation of new order, which is what distinguishes complex systems from complicated systems. The LSE Group's contribution in the project has been primarily working with policymakers in the UK and other countries. So we've conducted a set of face to face interviews with policy makers. The main thing we wanted to understand was what are their challenges in preparing and implementing contingency plans. If we're looking at evacuation after a disaster, this is precisely what we wanted to understand. How do they prepare plans and how do they implement them in practice? And we had workshops with all these organizations. Now you remember, I don't think anyone can forget 7, 7 in London and also 9. We started with these two events because they really were major disasters. And one of the things we found was that communication was absolutely key and at the heart of both incidents. Unfortunately, in both cases, communication was not what it could have been or should have been. The other thing we've done in trying to understand that background in that context was attempt exercises by the London Fire Brigade and local authority. But the thing that I will be concentrating more on is two trials that we organized to trial the app. Now, this app was not initially intended to be developed by socionical. Those of you who understand complexity theory, if I say it was purely emergent and self organized, will understand what I'm talking about. It happened that three of us, three partners, two technical partners who had the capacity and us in London who were able to work with policymakers, actually developed it and trialled it so it was trialed during both the 2011 and to 2012 Lord Mayor show in London and we were part of the control center during the 2012 Olympics. It was also trialled within the City of Westminster and we also trialled it during the West End Live Festival. In addition, after the 2011 trial at the Lord Mayor show, the show is very much organized by the City of London Police, or at least the control center is very much organized by them. They were quite pleased with their results and what we've done now is actually developed an app especially for the City of London Police. It's primarily for the city business community and the residents, but it also has a special warning inform fixture that can be activated in case of an emergency. And we intend to have a future seminar with the City of London Police to actually describe it. Going back to socionical, this is very much part of what we are doing. We're looking very much at the impact on human decision making and social dynamics. And that's part of what I will be talking about. Again, the LSE leads on two deliverables. One is seminars for policymakers and we had several of those and then a set of guidelines and recommendations for policymakers. We've also organized and edited volume to be published by Springer in the spring of 2013. So you will actually have a lot of that work available quite soon. Okay, let's look at the Socionical app. The socionical app is for iPhones. That was primarily in 2011, but this year it was also made available for Android. Now what it does is it does at least two things. One is it provides users with information about the event. And in the Lord Mayor show, it provided transport advice on how to reach the location, information on the float. And that was particularly attractive this year because you could just hold up your phone to the float and it would give you all the information about the float as it was passing. And it could also tell you where different floats were along the route. Historic buildings in the immediate location, location of Lewis and St. John's Ambulance. And the two ones I've starred were the ones that were most popular. Now this is for the benefit of the users of the app for the organizers and the emergency services. What it provides is a heat map. And again, Paul will show you what it looks like, a heat map superimposed on a Google map. So you have an actual map and superimposed on that you have a heat map which shows the density of the crowd, it changes color. It's a heat map in the sense that as it becomes More crowded. The colors change from blue to green and yellow to red. So red is where most of the crowd is the greatest density of the crowd and you can see quite clearly the movement and direction of the crowd. So this is the information that you have live in front of a screen in the control center. So if there is to be an incident or if there is to be too much of a crowding in a particular area, the app can actually send what is called a location specific advice. So this is quite different. It's not like most apps that broadcast the information to everyone who has the app. It can actually send it very specifically to to those with a device in a particular location. As you can imagine, it would have a lot of ethical issues. So we were very, very strict about the ethical guidelines. So the app was only active during the day of the event and only during a geographic boundary around the event. There was a very clear explanation of the purpose of the app, saying, this is part of scientific project, your data will be used for this purpose, and so on. It was always purely anonymous. We have no access to the identity of the users. We only know that a particular device has the app. All data were amalgamated and of course we observed European Commission regulations, we were cleared by our own socioeconical ethics committee and so on. So we organized the trials. We're part of the control center. But the most important thing is that we discussed impact with policymakers by conducting face to face interviews. However, in addition to all that, we also had a survey. So after the end of the show of the Lord Mayor show, we sent through a request for people to fill in a survey and then we also asked them if. If they would wish to participate in an anonymous, very short telephone interview that gave us a lot of insights into why people would use it. And I will give you some of that information in a moment. But first of all, I want to give you some findings on the app by policymakers. The way they see it is that the purpose of crowd monitoring is to provide information, the density and movement of a crowd, to use the information to enhan security and safety. That's the key to enhance security and safety of those taking part in the event and obviously to help with the appropriate deployment of resources. Resources, as we all know, are getting scarcer and scarcer and it's very important to deploy them appropriately, but also to identify abnormal patterns in movement or density that may become critical. So it's, as I said, a live assessment of what is happening. At the same time, there are CCTV cameras and there are Stewards and marshals that are walking the routes. So we're getting constant updates as to what is happening, both from humans and from the CCTV cameras. But what neither can do is give us a complete overview of exactly what is happening throughout the course of the event. And it's, of course, you know, assistive vikamera cannot do that. It was particularly valuable during the. During the fireworks display, because during the fireworks display, CCTV cameras don't actually work. And it was the first time that the City of London police could actually have a clear overview of the entire route around the Thames where people were standing to watch the fireworks, and they could actually see where the greatest density were. That meant that the following year they could plan where the stands were, et cetera, much more effectively. One of the things they also said was that using the heat map was intuitive and did not need any training. However, the important thing is that it needs a trained officer to actually identify potential critical issues and take appropriate action. And this is one of the quotations from one of the. The policy makers actually using it. He said, it's one of those pieces of kit that you do not realize its true potential until you actually use it. And I think that really says it all. It does have two weaknesses. It does not provide actual numbers because everything is amalgamated. So all we see is the crowd as a whole. But we cannot say X numbers are in that particular location. And of course, the heat map only reflects the number of users and only those with an active app.
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However.
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B
However, what was very interesting was even though a very small proportion of people were using the app, we could check it all the time with CCTV camera footage that we were seeing live in the control center and getting the reports in from the stewards. And what we were getting from the app, the readings we were getting from the app, were actually very accurate, which is incredibly interesting. Okay. The survey also gave us some very interesting insight. We asked them, you know, would you consult your iPhone for advice during an emergency? 70% actually said they would. I was actually quite surprised. And then we asked them, okay, if you're actually running for your life, would you stop and look at your mobile phone? And not everyone would while they're running, but almost everyone said, when it is safe to do so, I would stop and look at it. And of course, it very much depends on the type of emergency and also whether there were official personnel present. We still prefer to have another human to tell us what to do rather than doing what advice that we get through our mobiles. And then we asked Would you actually take that advice? And the answer was quite consistent. If it came from an authoritative source we could trust, then yes, we would take it. If the information was reliable and consistent with what I am experiencing, I would take it. So for example, if the information I'm getting actually conflicts with what I'm actually seeing and hearing around me, I'm not going to take it. But if it is consistent, then I will. And of course, obviously, if the technology is robust and doesn't fall, fall, 30% said that they would prefer to follow instructions from figures of authority. As I was saying, another human is often much more convincing. Paul would probably disagree with me. But that is what we heard.
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Paul.
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And we also asked them, would you communicate? You know, you're in the minority, you're very few who have the app. Would you actually give this information to other people? And again, it was very consistent. We were told yes, we will actually tell those around face to face by voice, or we would Twitter or you could use other social media to actually send that information. The app also tells you who of your friends on Facebook are within the event, not where they are, but whether they are attending the event. So you can actually send it to them specifically. One interesting thing was crowd behavior after the fireworks. And this is the sort of thing we got from a telephone interview that you can't actually get from just an ordinary survey. What we found, what we were told, is that when everyone leaves, they all leave at the same time. There were particular areas, there were exit barriers where it was difficult for people to leave. So these are actual barriers that are erected for that period that were in the wrong place. Now we wouldn't have known this otherwise, but this has come through that in fact in that particular location, the barriers were actually creating a potential danger. So one of the insights that we have is that the visualization by itself, the app by itself is not enough to establish things like position of barriers. And we do need the additional information of context, an understanding of crowd behavior which was provided through the telephone interviews. I want to finish by giving you four different contexts where emergency planning takes place. We did some interviews in Malta and now want to give you the island wide major incident context there, especially flooding. They suffer very badly from, from flooding in Malta. Munich, this is going to be an event based emergency planning. And then two London contexts. One is city scale mass evacuation and the other is city transport infrastructure emergency. Obviously the main objective in Malden, in fact for I should think all emergency personnel is to save lives, property and the environment in that order of Priority. It was stated, it was pointed out to us. Their challenges is gathering up to date data when preparing, for example, for earthquakes. They also need to know about current building materials and how they react to stress. They also need to know about demographics and mobility of those who may be affected. One of the big challenges is what are called flash floods. These happen very quickly. These are caused by rain, not by a river or sea breaking banks and flooding. This is very, very heavy rain which causes these very, very quick floods. And the Maltese seem to be suffering from them quite badly. And they are doing a lot of preparation work with exercises and so on. Now let me change the context to Munich and give you an event based preparation. The main challenge is safety of those attending the event. And I was very glad to hear these are based on in depth interviews that they don't use a standard formula but need to take into account a combination of factors. So it's not just the numbers but also the type of event. For example, at classical concerts they can have higher numbers without the same risk as they would have at a different kind of concert. And also what else is happening like fireworks. And then it's also the distribution, density and location of participants and potential pressure points. Now, now, in concerts in particular, if you imagine the pressure in those at the front near the stage is at its greatest. And in fact some of the work one of our other partners is doing in ETH Zurich is working is looking at those pressure points. Communication and I will keep coming back to this point of communication. In this case it was communication between the fire brigade, the organizers, or between the different emergency services. Absolutely key. And they kept on emphasizing it. The challenges are to avoid panic, that exits are visible and not obstructed. And again, communication in case people need to leave a different way to the way they came in. They also need a very good overview which they don't have at the moment. And this is something, for example, something like the app will provide, which they simply do not have. They do not have. Now.
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Now.
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They do have helicopters, but the helicopter pictures are not just in time. The third context is city scale mass evacuation. Now one of the. In London we have quite an interesting configuration. We have 33 local authorities that can be involved in pan London emergencies. What we're talking about, when I'm talking about mass evacuation, this is an emergency affecting more than 100,000 people and involving all the emergency services. So this is not event planning. This is something that is unexpected and it involves a very large number of people. And tidal flooding in London would be Such an event, interestingly enough, one of the challenges is accepting the need for a mass evacuation and preparing comprehensive plans. These are not events that happen that frequently. They have a huge impact, but they happen infrequently. And when you are a policy maker that has great pressure and stress on your budget, are you going to allocate resources to something that may happen once every 50 or 100 years, even though if it does happen, it's going to have massive impact? And again, communication with the public to warn and inform with the other emergency services. Now we know from 77 that this communication with the other emergency services was one of the big problems. We now have airwave, which means that the emergency services can communicate even though they don't need the ordinary mobile network, and also convincing policymakers to make their resources available. The last context I want to look at is the city transport infrastructure. Now, as you well know, in London we have an infrastructure which has several types of transport, tube buses, DLR rail, etc. The point is that they are intricately interconnected and interdependent. And it is that interdependency which is key because they need integrated plans. So one of the challenges is to understand the risk and how to mitigate it when risks are at multiple levels and of different types. So there would be societal, industrial, environmental risks. And this is one of the challenges that they need to face. So it is understanding the overall picture of the event and coordinating. The other problem is getting factual information quickly out of to the public. That's another key element. And again, this is where something like an app would probably do a good job. They also need to know what messages those involved are receiving from the media and so on. Now, before an incident, again, a challenge is to encourage people to think about the future and to understand the likely impact, what can and cannot be done and how people are likely to respond and to learn from other incidents. But the whole point is again, this idea of communication is communicating with the public, communicating with policymakers, communicating with the politicians who need to make the funding available. So the challenges are multidimensional, but one is common to all. And I think you will agree that that is effective and timely communication. And this is where I think the Socionico Lab could contribute as part of a toolkit, not by itself, it cannot be the answer to everything, but as part of a toolkit, it's. It could be very useful because it can send immediate and location targeted information and advice both to the public and as an additional channel between the emergency services. And there's a lot of research now continuing on, overcoming current problems with the communications infrastructure being overstretched or collapsing during an emergency. That's the end of my presentation. I will hand over now to Paul. Both Paul and Nestor have presentations which are a lot more colorful and visually exciting than mine is. But Paul will now tell you all about the science behind the app.
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C
Yeah, so I'd like to speak about technology. And the first thing I want to show you another app. And actually it's something when you see the blue points, there's actually the lights in my room of my house. And if I just press something like this, I switch off the kitchen light when my family is having dinner and my wife is likely to call me soon, probably. So the reason I'm showing that really is that it illustrates a point that is central to the app and many other applications that the Economist very nicely summarized in a recent article about the digital world and the physical. The real world increasingly becoming interweaved and influencing each other. And it is a sum of many things that we see in everyday lives. Mobile phones controlling stuff, providing information about stuff. But very often you fail to grasp the significance of it in a bigger picture. And that's what I want to show you. And that is something where this app that Eve was describing is just the first drop in things that will be changing radically in the way we perceive the world. We interact with it and we influence it.
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E
So.
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C
Talking about information, that's another thing I found significant. You may remember when the Americans actually. So sorry. And actually, look, here's my phone ringing and that's my wife calling me probably about the lights. And you know, what you see here is when Americans nap, there was somebody sitting in a house in the area who was tweeting that online. So he was tweeting like there are helicopters and it's not usual. And for me it's another significant thing because what you see is that there's this top secret raid at the end of the world and the whole world can see it online, can actually participate in it online. And that's something that's very different and new. You never had in history of humanity. And you know, the sources of information are very many. You can look at searches in Google here in the city of London, if you think about the data that you have from the Oyster card. Another thing, if you have a mobile phone, you have a mobile phone, then obviously your provider knows your approximate location. And now think about it, I think, I don't know half of humanity have mobile phones, which means that you live in a time where the exact location of about half of humanity is known at any given point of time, including their heading. Now, that's not information that you maybe have readily access to because of many reasons, which are good reasons. But in theory, that information is digitally available. That is quite significant. And if you look at phones, it's not just location. There are many things you could do with a phone. You know, a phone is very smart. It's got gps, it's got a compass, it's got motion sensors. It's got a lot of sensors that can look at the environment, like a camera. And you actually have a lot of apps, things like count your steps. You have apps that will actually tell you how far you're jumping or skiing. And you have those apps that tell you where your friends are and things like that. And the phones can do a lot of stuff with it. So here's one example. Eve was saying, you can look at the location, I'll show you a movie later, and you can do a heat map of people, and you can look where people are moving, but you can do more if you look at the acceleration sensors. And that's the sensor you use to essentially rotate your screen when you have your phone, right. But also gives you motion. So, you know, if people go running or standing, you can see if they're walking up or down the stairs. So you can imagine, in an emergency situation, you may poll the people's mobile phones to see whom you can actually send jumping over the wall to escape and who should actually be taking the easy route because he's not very mobile. And, you know, you could look at motion patterns of people. So we have, for example, a project with a medical project, when we use this sort of data recorded from mobile phone with psychiatrists for real diagnosis of people with manic or depressive states. So the amount of information that you can actually get, you can look at it and imagine half of humanity have this. So you could have a picture of how active, happy, or manic or depressed half of humanity is at any given state or people at your local event. Other thing that we did in looking at crowd density is you mentioned that the penetration is an issue. How many people have an application. But a lot of you have mobile phones, and most of you will have the Bluetooth switched on, on the phone because you may use some headset or something. And if I have my phone and I scan any visible Bluetooth devices, it's a very good way of inferring crowd density. So now a small amount of people can actually do that. We did it at Munich. So you see, that's the Munich Oktoberfest. And you can see the amount of found Bluetooth devices as a function of a number of people. We did similar thing during New Year's Eve in Zurich, where we had actually only 40 people walking around with logging Bluetooth devices. And they discovered, I think three or four thousand unique IDs. So it's very interesting how much information you can get from that. And the other interesting thing is actually sound. So mobile phones has got a microphone and if you actually look at the sound, you can see if there's a lecture, if people are panicking, if there's a fire, if you. I don't know, on a beach, in a church, in a football stadium. And what's happening now, that is something that certainly is a privacy issue, but there are solutions. So we did a lot of work on this, not in respect with the Sochennica lab. And what you can do is instead of recording sound from which you can distinguish speech, you can record very small snippets, like say a tenth a second every second, and you can even mix them so that you cannot get speech from it. But it's still enough to see if people are screaming in fear or if you actually, in a lecture or something like this. And again, you remember those is data that you can get from a standard mobile phone. You can actually process and recognize this on a phone of people who would use it. And of course, the big thing behind it is that it's not like, you know, it's just a single person. I think here in London, you probably have something like 30, 40% penetration rate of smartphones. A lot of those phones are connected to Facebook, to Twitter. And you increasingly see the trend that people are uploading that information automatically, things like Foursquare. So what you get is an extremely complex pattern of information that is being streamed from those devices to the network that you can possibly leverage. And as you see those things, this has many different ethical and privacy and other consequences. But it also has huge potential. And if you compare it in London, you probably cannot walk a few steps without being filmed by a CCTV camera. So probably the information that you get from those devices is much more valuable than what you can get from. From the cctv. So here's the movie that we have. I think I need a mouse to actually start it. Let me just see. So that is what we did with the app. It's sort of a nice visualization. So the general idea is that you. Sorry, I Know people who would. I don't know what happened here.
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Sorry.
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That's why I always use my Mac to do presentations. So you see people using, you know, the app with standard information, as Eve was saying, and then that information provided people consented to it is being transmitted. And here you see the heat map as it's being built up. And then you can see actually on the pink line, that's where the procession started, the Lord Mayo's procession. You can see as the crowd slowly builds up. And what you see is real data. So that's actually the data that we got from the Lord Mayo's show. And you can see that the red and the high things are where you have high crowd density. And you can see now as the percent people move to the other side of the river. And that is the type of information that you would get from, from the system. And the interesting thing is that as Eve said, there's a difference between seeing 50 cameras and having this sort of a concise information that can potentially automatically detect problems and say things like, there may be possible congestion here. And the other interesting thing is that you can then send this situated information. And that is really another extremely important part of technology. Something that, you know, you see with Google is another that you're not in different areas. So the power of Google and advertising lies in the fact that you get ads that are targeted to what you are doing. And you can do the same sort of thing that if somebody is walking and you get a general announcement, something please, this and this subway station is overcrowded, don't go that. This is a different, you know, different impact than if you have somebody who says you, you walking over there, you just walking into a crowded station. So people react differently. The other thing is we've been talking to people organizing, for example, the Oktoberfest. And if you think now about organizing an evacuation of an area, then probably the optimal evacuation route would involve many different groups of people moving in many different directions, many different ways. Now try organizing that just with stewards there. You have to send somebody you can shout through a microphone. It doesn't work. With this sort of technology, you can really send a crowd of people into 200 different directions, exactly timed. And of course there's a question of compliance. But Eve spoke about that. And there's another thing that increasingly people are using this sort of technology as their default way of getting information. So I was discussing with Nestor before, if you think today, if you go to any event, to anything, the most likely thing you're going to do before you go is to go to a website and see information. That's like 50% of the people would do that. Increasingly, people will not do that. They will look for an app. And that is something that is happening. And once people start trusting in this app, that takes off. And what I wanted to say, this sort of location thing is really primitive. That's another article I found some time ago, not that long ago. It says, you know, Microsoft patents, bad neighborhood detection. That sounds strange. You know, they built operating systems, but of course, once you think that they're selling mobile phones and phones that can give people direction, people can use to buy things. And you combine that information on a statistical level, you're likely to find out soon which neighborhoods are being visited, visited by which people, which neighborhoods may be avoided by which people, and you can actually build that sort of information. Again, it's not unproblematic. I don't know if I would like to have this information being built about my neighborhood, but that information is there. So really summarizing this, I told you a lot of things, and I guess most of those things you knew, but it really is the significance of the sum of those things. And to understand it, it may be a good idea to look at Internet, which everybody grasps. And I think the biggest impact of the Internet has been that any piece of knowledge that humanity has ever created suddenly become accessible at your fingertips. You can find it. Anything that you cannot find on Google is not really relevant. That is increasingly the thing that you see and of course the ability to correlate that information. So what you see now is the next stage. What you are now seeing is that not just archival knowledge that people created is becoming visible online increasingly with things like Twitter sensing, you see that anything that is happening in the real world, any physical event, increasingly leaves a trace in the digital domain. You know, few years will pass by and nothing will be able to happen which will not be instantly visible. You see that already. If there's an earthquake, it first becomes visible in the digital media before something else happens. So, you know, it's something I call the digital shadow. And of course it's not like you see it directly, but I think that is the basic technology, the basic fundamental change that you're seeing, the relationship between electronic computing technology and the real world is that you have this digital shadow that everything can be searched, can be correlated, becomes visible. And we're just at the beginning of trying to exploit that with things like the app. Of course there's the other side of it, and you know, I got it from the press again, you had this London riot where people were focusing on things like phones. I don't know how much truth to it is, but if you think about this, the technology does have another impact. There's this blending of digital and the real. So if you think with old technology, you know, even standard mobile phones, right? So we had a guy, he put a flame a couple of cars, then he would call a buddy and say, hey, I'm burning up cars. Would you like to join me? It's fun. And the other guy would be having a beer at the sofa. So he may or may not come and he would tell guys, and not much happened. Now, what happens today is that the people go and they can make a video of a burning car. And there's. With a trifan pose and then with a single click, that video is being distributed over Facebook. Thousands of people who all have this tendency of having fun burning cars, you know, because they somehow belong to the same whatever group. And pulse, that is a totally different type of interaction that the technology allows. It's not just calling, it's just fundamentally changing how humans influence each other. And that comes back to Eve's complex systems talk. That if you look, of course, at human communities or whatever, collective of devices or of people, it's really the interactions. It's the patterns of interconnections. It's the strength of interactions along those interconnections that determines global system behaviors. And technology fundamentally changes that. Patterns of interaction, the flow of information, the intensity of interaction and the connectivity. And that gets to A's. So essentially what you would like to have is some sort of technology that could, you know, elevate this. And there are many things that you can think of. The ability to predict and warn, which is what he was talking about. You know, the question, could you. Could you adapt the infrastructure and you run different moral things? But if you have the warning, could you have, I don't know, stop subways going in the direction of the riots? Could you have stopped the information flow? Many things you could do, you know, could you warn people? But that, of course, raises questions. So, you know, you could have another thing. You know, this technology can, of course, easily be misused. And of course, once you do this technology, it can be used for both sides. So you wouldn't like to have something like this essentially resulting from the technology that you're using. And that's why it's important to have the type of projects we have when people like me who just love the technology and Love switching lights at their home and doing all sort of more useless stuff. And people like Eve, who really seriously thinks about policies implications and humans work together to make those systems do something good. Okay, thank you very much.
- [46:08]
G
And I guess it's now to me to. I think I'll change the title of my presentation slightly. So rather than talking from a policy making perspective, I want to be talking a bit more about from a practitioner's perspective, someone on the ground putting in place plans and trying to work with communities to help them help themselves in an emergency. How does this app actually then make us change the way we do things or could make us change the way we do things. And I guess the first thing is try to give you a bit of context of where I'm coming from. So the City of London Corporation is the local authority or is a body that has local authority powers that covers the geographical patch that's between the nice little quite big actually statue of a dragon just off the Aldridge. So just by the Royal Courts of Justice, I'm sure most of you have seen it at some point and it goes all the way down to the Tower of London. So that's the geographical patch that we covered. The City of London Corporation plus we have a number of different activities that go a bit further than that. So we have offices in Brussels, in my Shanghai, Beijing and of course the Guildhall which is our main base. So it's a bit of a kind of interesting and quirky, weird organization. But we also have things like a property portfolio that involves housing estates and, and other type of things like Barbican which is a massive kind of set of privately owned and some of the corporation owned flats that are rented to people. But I would say quite high prices, maybe a bit too high, I don't know. But you also. We run things like the animal reception center at Heathrow, Port Health for the whole of the tidal Thames, open spaces further afield. So I don't know how many of you have been to Hampstead Heath or Epping Forest. That's one of the things that we operate. And we also have three very large wholesale markets. So the largest meat market in London, the largest fish market in London, a huge vegetable market. So that's kind of operations that are not necessarily your traditional local authority functions. But we still have to care and look at after our.
- [48:35]
C
Community.
- [48:36]
G
And part of that care of community includes looking after some iconic buildings like Tower Bridge and all the other bridges between Westminster and the Tower. But as a local authority. So with our local authority hat on, we have a number of roles that are common to all local authorities. So we're there to support the emergency services and do what even was saying before, which is kind of help preserve life and preserve property and look after the environment. So that kind of thing. We have a duty to support our community. So not only our residential community, but the business community, we have a duty to coordinate with other responding agencies. So environment agency, Met Office, central government, City of London Police, etc. And then we also, as with a local authority, hat on we need on recovery and restoration. So what do we do after the big bang? So how do we make sure that people's lives can continue, that we can keep the city running?
- [49:43]
C
And.
- [49:45]
G
I now want to focus on how we do certain things that are particularly useful for us in emergencies or in dealing with emergencies at the minute. What are our current capabilities? And then I'm going to tell you about what we see the app could add to these current capabilities. So at the minute we have. I don't know how many of you have walked around the city and noticed that the city is now getting bins. For a long time we had no bins in the city and that annoyed a lot of people. But now we're getting bins and these beings are these bins are bump proof. But not only are they bump proof, they also have screens at either end. So you have screens delivering live messages at either side of your recycle bin. So they tell you about the tube. So you can see there, there's a bit of information about kind of what lines are running in the tube and that's that kind of information that's useful to the people that are walking on the streets in the city. So that's one of the things that we can use to deliver messages. So that duty to warn and inform the public during an emergency, we can use that as one of the things that we, one of the tools that we have in that toolbox for warning and informing. But we also have something called imodels messaging, which is a very simple at the minute text message or SMS alert that you can send to all city businesses. City police use it, we use it as well. And you can tell them, hey guys, there's something happening. Take the riots example. We can tell them there's just rioting happening in X, Y, Z locations. Even though it's not necessarily in our patch. We can, we can suggest you that you should, you might want to look at your security arrangements and start putting measures in place to protect yourself, to help yourself be safer, so that's kind of one of the things that we've been doing for quite a while. And you have multi platform messaging so you can send it via sms, you can send it to smartphones via emails and all the different normal ways that we're all very familiar with of receiving messages. But on top of that we're working on enhancements so that people can receive messages because they're interested in a specific area. So say for instance if your office is based around Bank Station, you can now subscribe or you will soon be able to subscribe to messages affecting bank area. So something happens around bank, we can let people that are interested in the bank area know about what something, what has happened and how they can help themselves be safer. If say for instance you are in the city, in an area of the city, we can also send messages to those businesses that we know are based in a specific location. So not necessarily because you're devised in that specific location, that's what I'm going to talk in the next slide. But because that, that location will help you kind of put a bit of context onto that messaging. And we have a public address system, a set of speakers dotted around the city that we can actually broadcast shout at people from the streets. But it's a very kind of rudimentary system. It's a very simple technology. It's just a public address system that's around the city. Now what does the app actually, what does the app actually could give us? So what's the added layer of enhancement that the app can bring to this picture? We can actually push messages that are geographically specific to the wider population even if the mobile networks are down. And Paul didn't mention this, but one of the interesting features, features of the app or one of the interesting, I don't know if it's active or could.
- [53:48]
C
Be active, but it's something you could develop. You're actually working on developing it.
- [53:53]
G
Is it Wildfire? You call it Wildfire. So if the mobile networks are down, you could use that technology that's in your smartphone to help do some peer to peer communication and distribute that way messaging. So it's an added level of resilience to your messaging with the benefit that you can also target it to specific locations. So you can say so for those people that are around this immediate vicinity of an incident, you can tell them to do certain things. So evacuate to X distance from Bank Station or move to, I don't know, the monument side and you will get help from the ambulance service or whatever it is that you need to tell them to help them be safer during that incident. But then there's also, you can have an added functionality in the app that lets you do sort of behind the scenes messaging, which is really, really useful because you can then communicate to other people in your trusted network and tell them messages that are not being broadcasted to the wider public. You can still do quite kind of wide broadcasting of messages, but to a more selected audience. And then there's something that's really, really interesting about the app and it's that ability to gather feedback from the population. So at the minute, when we have an incident, when we have an emergency, it's very difficult for us to understand how the community sees our work during an emergency, actually helped them. So what their opinion was of the emergency, the quality of emergency response they got from the different services from the local authority and help involve and shape the type of response they'll get in future emergencies. By actually contributing to a kind of debrief of an incident. That's something that we don't have at the minute, but the app could help facilitate that. There's other channels that can also help. So social media, that kind of thing that helps. But the app gives us a very kind of direct link to someone that we know was in a specific place, had the app active, used the app to receive emergency messages, we instructed them to do certain things and then we can ask them, so how was, how was our service to you help us shape future responses. And then the other area, how am I doing time one. I'm not relaxing too much, don't worry. So the other area is, how do we get the picture of what's happening in emergency manner? You call that situational awareness? How do you know what's out of there? Because of course, when you're trying to deal with an emergency, you need to know what's happening so you know what resources to deploy and what the type of response that you're putting in place. So at the minute, as Paul and Eve said, we can look at cctv. There's a brilliant network, cctv. We not only have the ability to look at our own network, CCTV cameras in the Citi Corporation, but we share a network with the City of London Police. So both can see, we both can see each other, cameras, and it's a really comprehensive network of CCTV and we can even approach local businesses and we know which local businesses have cameras and we can approach them and say, can we tap into your CCTV camera network to look at what's happening outside your building? So that's a current feature that we can use to gain a situational awareness. And we have other alert systems. So you have fire detection systems and kind of other different alert systems that come into different control rooms of different bodies of corporation, the city of the corporation, city police, fire brigade, ambulance service. We have different alerts going to them and they would be able to build up that picture of what's happening out there. But then we also have people on the ground. So you have the beat officer for the police, you have our parking inspection people, you have building control. All the people that you normally see, the road sweepers, and they help you gain that, build that picture. But then we also have, as Paul said, that digital shadow. So something happens and immediately, you know, through it used to be sky, but now it's more, it's increasingly that digital shadow, it's increasingly through Twitter, through Facebook, you know what's going on. You get an immediate notification of what's happening out there from a variety of sources. So you can start kind of, if you like crowdsourcing your picture of what's happening out there. Now what the app could give us on top of that situational awareness or the initial one is what Paul was showing in the visualization of the crack of the heat map. It can tell us kind of what's the population size of the population that we're dealing with in an emergency, but not only what's the population size in a specific point in time. So not a snapshot like the census is, which was what we use for planning. So we use the census data tell us, well, this is the kind of mix up that you have in your community and this is the kind of population that you're responsible for. But the app actually tells you kind of what's the crowd density, how does that crowd move, how does it move over time, how does it change in the weekend, particularly in the city? You can imagine that the population mix up and the distribution of population when all the businesses have gone home for the weekend is very different from Monday morning rush hour. And if you've been through the bank station at that time, you know what I'm talking about. So. And you don't really want to know what I'm talking about, if you haven't been, don't go there. But there's also another thing, is the app could let us see in a kind of more generic way how the crowd moves, how the crowd behaves, how the crowd disputes, disperses. And that's quite important when you're talking about helping people help themselves. Because if you're trying to get people out of danger, it's a very interesting tool for how you deploy your resources to know where they're going and how they're getting away. And I think there's an added level of, of insight that the app can provide. And I touched slightly about it when I was talking about how it can help us communicate better with the community that we serve, and how it can help us have a richer debrief, a richer understanding of what happened and how a response was actually effective or not. But then from a planning perspective, the app can give us information that can help us design the urban environment. If you've been to the city, you've realized that the city has had. When I say the city, I mean that geographical patch that I was talking about earlier. If you've been to city, you realize that the city has had quite a number of interventions into the geographic, into the, into the urban space, into the physical space to make it safer. The app can give us added information that will help us design a safer city. And that's really something. There's something that we don't have at the minute. If you could see how the population behaves not only on a day to day basis, but during an incident, you can then overlay that information to your planning considerations, to how you design builders, to how you design pavements, to how you design roads to help you help your community better. And that's something that we don't have at the minute. It could be quite revolutionary. I think that's just a bit more about that interaction with the urban environment at the minute. We have resources like inquests and things to figure out what happened during an emergency. But if you have data that's being collated about how the urban environment interacts with people, or how people interact with the urban environment during an emergency, that is something that could quite change how we look at designing our cities. So it could have very different ramifications. And I think that's it from my side.
- [63:01]
A
Thank you very much. We have about 30 minutes left for questions. I'd like to take questions in sort of batches so I can get all three to comment on them. Please wait for a microphone. Identify yourself. But who would like to raise a question? Comment? Gentlemen in the. Anybody else?
- [63:25]
D
Yeah.
- [63:25]
A
Okay.
- [63:26]
E
Good evening.
- [63:27]
A
Yes, go ahead.
- [63:28]
B
Good evening.
- [63:29]
H
Thank you very much for your talk. I'd like to address something which worries me greatly about this, and that is the problem. I feel very threatened by being surveyed and I make sure that everything I do I cut myself off from these, anything which will keep track of me. So I feel threatened going through a street where I can see CCTV cameras. But I want to make a more general point, if I may, and that is that I feel particularly threatened when I am in a situation where somebody is telling me to do something and I have no way of responding to them. For example, I get on a tram going between Wimbledon and Croydon. I was told five times by people to get off that tram with my bicycle because you're not allowed a bike on a tram. The answer is you are allowed a folded bike and the bike was folded. Now, the people I spoke to personally, I could say, look, this is folded, it says only folded bikes allowed. But the person who was telling me over the Tannoy, you get off this tram now, otherwise we're not going anywhere. I had no way in which I could respond to it. And this is one thing which worries me greatly, that I am the recipient of all these messages, but I have absolutely no way of saying, look, yes, I know you want me to do this, but it would actually be safer to me if I did something different because I'm going home a different way and I know I can catch the whatever. So there's no two way communication. And I find that quite worrying as a development in society.
- [65:08]
A
Ok, thank you very much. The gentleman in the middle. We'll take three together otherwise, because you've all spoken for an hour, so let the audience have it.
- [65:19]
C
I've got two questions.
- [65:20]
G
The first one is maybe just a clarification. If I remember correctly, on 7 7, almost immediately the network, the mobile network went down or was put down.
- [65:30]
C
So what would happen to any emergency app?
- [65:36]
G
Second one is maybe related in some ways and it's. Is there any plan for the City of London to provide free universal WI fi coverage, including in the underground?
- [65:48]
A
Thank you. Gentleman in the blue shirt towards the back.
- [65:51]
B
Yes.
- [65:51]
A
Ask them to identify themselves. Could you identify yourselves as.
- [65:54]
D
Sure.
- [65:55]
F
Peter Dick, I'm in the Department of Health in Public Health. Thank you for the talk. All talks. I think it's very interesting. I'm interested in what you can or could do with the information that you're gathering. For example, it seems to me that you have quite a lot of information and people will have quite a lot of difficulty who gather that information in making decisions. What information to give back to the people in emergency situations. I mean, have you ideas about running real time simulations? For example, the sort of thing that Dirk Haupling does in Zurich, that sort of thing about Trying to understand what is the best advice you give to whom in emergency situations.
- [66:46]
A
Okay, and one more question. The woman at the front.
- [66:50]
E
As part of my master's program here.
- [66:52]
B
I'm involved in a consultancy project with.
- [66:54]
E
IBM in Brazil as part of their Smarter Cities initiative. And so there's a lot of work being done around Smarter Cities. And I'm wondering whether you guys are sharing this with other cities and kind of comparing notes and best practices.
- [67:08]
A
There was a question? Yes, please.
- [67:14]
D
Saeed Al Shukra, member of the Complexity Group. The comments rather than a question in terms of the application or validation, if you like, the decision, which has been very good and successful in various trials, but I'm talking about adverse weather conditions, for example, the recent event at Heathrow. And you compare the situation at Heathrow in Gatwick, although the difference is all about 25, 30 miles. Gatwick managed, planned, the crowd control and comfort and all the problem with it much better than he throw, although he throws always under the screen, if you like, in terms of demand, overpopulation and the gentleman here with the public authority, most of you, most of the clients and the customer are already subscribed through their mobile and their iPhone on the system to British Airways and the other carriers to improve communication. Because even with the media there was a chaos almost, it said, like a refugee camp. And it could have been managed better and situation will be much improved. And there was an investment in terms of removing the snow. And this is another issue, whether the Met Office will really predict snow, but not the amount of snow. I mean, it was heavily snow all over the country and in various situations, maybe one or two organization in the business could have taken that opportunity and retested the system to do a tested trial and validate some data. But I don't know whether that's been taken into consideration or not. Thank you.
- [68:51]
G
Sorry, I don't think I understood. So I'm not sure I'm clear what the question was on that one.
- [68:58]
D
No, no, the question was in terms of communication, it would be improved and if it was a good effective communication, the outcome would have been much better than what is being predicted. You gave the example of the local authority or lender corporation to use some of the app on the system, but that was a good opportunity to test and validate the system. Maybe a lot of customers are subscribing.
- [69:22]
C
Okay, I'll start your question because things are quite dear to my heart as well. And if you look at it, if you compare what you have today, which is that you have surveillance of the entire city by CCTV cameras, which is something you cannot opt out of. Whereas what weird's proposing is something which is on voluntary basis, which means, you know, if you in a crowd and if you would not like to contribute information, you can actually still use the app for information, but you're not transmitting anything. So the big difference here is you're talking about so called participatory sensing which most people don't mind if they know and that's about this knowledge. They know what it's for, but you can opt out. And the other thing that you said about information, actually we have some and plants that you could have this two channel information, but especially about understanding. So one of the things that people for example in Munich told us is important. You have a huge event, right? And you don't have something like the app. It's very difficult to deliver any sort of targeted information. Why are things happening with this sort of an app? You can say, you know, you are in this part and ahead of you the exit is blocked. This is what we would like you to go to a different place. So certainly it's not a perfect system. I think on both accounts of what you said, it constitute actually an improvement rather than making things worse. And just to continue, the answer to the question about the WI FI network.
- [70:51]
G
So again when it comes to the two way communication issue, that's something that we have, we feel very dear and that's one of the things that I think the whole debrief and the ability to check, perhaps not in real time, but then after the incident through a survey through the people that we send the messages, how was the message for you? So that's something that we don't have. So again that's another enhancement of the app.
- [71:20]
C
Do you want to carry on with.
- [71:21]
A
The other technical points?
- [71:25]
C
So that's something that in the current version of the app was not there. But as you all know, your smartphones can communicate via Wi Fi. And most of you, or some of you may know you can actually make your smartphone an access point that will allow your notebook to connect to the Internet. And what can easily be done is that actually you take those WI fi functionalities and build something like an ad hoc network. And we actually now have a project that works on that. So what happens is that even if you have a total breakdown of any communications, you can actually use the smartphones to conduct the information. So it's non trivial, but it's something we are actually working on which would be a huge benefit for handling emergency situations.
- [72:04]
B
I'd like to answer the question about cities. The project has 10 different countries that are part of the project. So. So initially, yes, we are doing some of it, but I should say not enough yet. So if you would like to talk to us about it later and you'd like us to sort of disseminate a particular city you have in mind, we'd be delighted. But yes, we are doing it as much as we can because I said with 10 different countries in the project, I think it's bound to happen. Now, I was not sure about the gentleman with Public Health what your question was. Can you just repeat it, please?
- [72:57]
F
You're using clever technology to get the information. I think you could use clever technology to decide what to do with that information once you've got it.
- [73:06]
B
Yes, absolutely.
- [73:07]
C
I just want to comment on that. You mentioned the grabbing is actually somebody we work with a lot in different projects and that is an obvious thing. So that's something that is happening. I just wanted to answer also the Brazil question. So actually we now have a project proposal that will be submitted in two weeks together with Brazilian institutes in Sao Paulo on actually using exactly this technology for crowd control. So. So the stuff is happening.
- [73:33]
B
And anyone on the adverse weather conditions?
- [73:38]
G
Well, if I understood right, the question is more than about the adverse weather conditions, it's about how to make the comms better and how to add quality and how to use the information that we're getting from the validation of the trials with the app to help us understand how to communicate better. And I think that's what that socynical is doing as part of their recommendations to policymakers. So hopefully that will come to a certain way to address that. How can policymakers then use that information that has been validated through different trials to help us shape the way we communicate with the public, how we warn and inform the public about emergencies or even events in a better way. So hopefully that comes to a certain way to. I think when it comes to sharing our information with different cities being one of the biggest, if not the biggest, financial centre in the world, we have quite close ties with other financial centres in the world. So we have close ties with Singapore, for instance, and we recently had a visit from the Singapore Fire Authority looking at how we communicate about mass evacuation and things like, well, not massive evacuation, but evacuation, simultaneous evacuation of different businesses. And that prompts another project that we're working on in the city. But we also work with people like La Defense in Paris, which is another financial district that is very similar to us. We work with that New York Federal Emergency Agency, sorry, the New York Emergency Management Agency. And we sent someone very recently there, one of our team, to do a research project with them as part of the Churchill Fellowship and actually understand what they did to cope with 9 11, what they did to cope with the recovery after 911 and trying to understand those lessons and bring them back to London. And that's one of the things that we try to do as a city. We see ourselves as part of a wider global community and we, we make sure that we engage with our other partners in that global community as much as we can. We're also engaging with the knowledge transfer networks, particularly the Smart Cities Catapult, which I'm sure you're aware of. So that's what we're doing. But again, as Eve said, anything that you can help to help us engage with more partners, we're more than happy to be in touch. I guess there's also, there was also the question about what would we do about WI fi? And I think that was very targeted to City of London Corporation, particularly. I think the City London Corporation is at the minute. And I know we did a lot of work with tfl, particularly around how to provide WI fi or Internet so that people could use their smartphones to get better advice during the Olympics. That was a very specific trial and I think TFL has decided to keep the access. But now, because of the kind of commercial private considerations that they've entered with, I believe is Virgin Media, that access is now charged. So that I think accessing the underground network falls slightly outside our remit. But we're doing our best to work with TFL to take into account the needs of the city community when it comes to overgrown WI fi. We are, we already have a very comprehensive network of public access WI fi in the city, in the square mile at the minute. I know one of our teams is looking at the business model for it. Is it feasible for us, with the level of funding that we have for this kind of project, to expand that, to provide full coverage for the whole square mile, or are we just keeping what we have at the minute, which gives in certain hotspots free access to WI fi? I think depends. At the end of the day, it's about resources and how you deploy them more efficiently. So that will decide if that becomes available. I can't speak for wider London, I'm afraid, though.
- [78:04]
A
Further questions? Okay, 1, 2, 3. Please identify yourself, speaking to the microphone.
- [78:13]
C
Good evening, My name is Jordan and I'm a computer science student undergraduate and.
- [78:19]
G
I Have a question.
- [78:22]
C
The application, how it works is that it gets the information from this map, right, that shows the crowds, but is this information available only in crucial circumstances or users can get access to this map with crowds at all times?
- [78:46]
I
Hi, I'm Ruth from Oxford and Sustainable Urban Development and I have two questions. First is that is this app being developed for the as a research tool for policymakers and for strategic planning of the government, or are these being promoted for the end user for them to feel safe, that they would be in a safer city. And then second is logistic wise, if ever that this will be very effective and in the promotion people would really use this app. How about are your existing police or, you know, security forces effective in responding immediately to the people who are. Would be your using these apps in case of emergency. Thank you. I hope it's clear.
- [79:40]
A
Would you repeat your.
- [79:41]
I
The last. Yeah. It's about logistics that you are promoting that this at the end for the end users, when they use this apps and they activate it, they would feel safer in case of emergency that they call for police. Would they be. Is the city. Can the city respond to it by increasing police forces, logistics, increasing your police forces.
- [80:10]
A
Okay, I think.
- [80:11]
I
Thank you.
- [80:11]
A
We think we're there. That's very helpful. Gentleman at the front here.
- [80:17]
B
Yes, that two years.
- [80:20]
G
Hello.
- [80:21]
A
Yeah, so it's on.
- [80:23]
C
Hello.
- [80:23]
G
Keith Lemon, notes plane officer, London Borough Camden. Two questions. Really noticed on Eve's first presentation project started around 2009 up until 2013. So I'll be keen what the actual end result is or what happens past 2013 with this project and the app. The other thing, just curious question in terms of the funding, how much funding has gone into the project? If that's come from the eu? Well, that's been formed partly this.
- [80:52]
A
Okay. Just along from you. Yep.
- [80:56]
E
Hello.
- [80:57]
A
Yes, he's on. Just speak.
- [81:00]
E
Louise Elstow, also from the London Borough of Camden's emergency planning team. It was a really quick question which is to ask possibly an obvious question, is that have you considered potentially using the app for the Olympics in Brazil in four years? That's a very obvious, very large. Sorry. Whether you considered using the app in Brazil in the Olympics. That's a very large event with a very large space and a very controlled, obvious set of people who may need directing towards a number of exits. Having gone to the Olympic park in the summer several times, it would have been very useful to know if there was particular hot spot stations. And other than a person with a board and some very friendly people telling you to do that if you also have that on an app, it might be something you could use.
- [81:50]
A
Thank you very much. Who'd like to start?
- [82:00]
C
This is sort of a mix up of the functionality. So what the app does is that essentially the users see general information about the event and a map that's obviously only available during the events. It does. It doesn't make sense otherwise. But if it was like for the city in general, you could have it available always. The crowd density thing is an information that's being generated at the control center and was currently not made visible to the, to the public. But it could be, although it's a policy question to today emergency people, you know, it's a question, how can it be used or misused?
- [82:33]
G
Yeah, because it highlights vulnerabilities. If you, if you can see real data of crowd gatherings and you're the person targeting the crowd might not necessarily be the best idea.
- [82:45]
B
We had a lot of debate actually whether we could make the heatmap available. Technically it's feasible, not a problem. It is whether it is safe to do so. So the debate came down on the fact that, that that would not be information that at the moment it would be safe to make available. But as you know, we said technically it would be possible to do that. And of course, the other thing is that even though we've trialled it in specific events, the one we now have for the City of London Police, this is a constant, but it doesn't provide location information because you would not want people to know where you are every day, 24 hours a day. That facility only becomes active if there's an actual incident. And then you will be asked if you can activate that feature so that it can then become the much more active app of sending you information and also sending out the, you know, using the sensors to send your location information. So we have to separate what is technically feasible and what is politically and security possible.
- [84:13]
G
And ethically.
- [84:14]
B
And ethically exactly possible.
- [84:18]
A
Hang on just a second. Bring the mic.
- [84:25]
C
So basically the app has the feature to obtain the identity information of the user only if he accepts so or.
- [84:32]
B
No, not the identity of the user, only the location of the device.
- [84:37]
C
So we do not store the identity. And the point is that for some of the research in the current version, we actually did store the anonymous location. But of course, if you worked in the area, you know that it's impossible to anonymize location information in the long run because you can trace it. So the notion is that what you retain is a density information, so you don't even retain unique IDs anonymized and that makes sure that there's no personalized information to be retained and then coming back. And I think it relates to the question of the lady about making people feel safe or not. I think that is an interesting question. What you might understand is that essentially the app has been developed, has primarily been a research app that we continue to support because people found it useful. And then certainly the interesting question is what would be the benefit? How would it be used? It's certainly important to make sure that people feel safer with it because that is for them the motivation to provide their location information. You know, the principle is you don't just pull the information off people, you offer people an incentive to provide the information, which in this case is if you are in the middle of a crowd, you may actually want whoever controls the crowd to know what is happening and what you need. And that comes back to this visibility of the heat map. You know, those are very complex questions because you may actually argue that if there is something, something happening, you would like to have that information to know how to best escape or what happening. But then of course you give people information where best to place the bomb and you could argue they could have this anyway. So those are really things that you wanted to start as a debate. And why we work with policymakers, with social scientists to understand I think there's a huge potential in it and how to best use it is difficult to say.
- [86:26]
B
Do you want also to say about.
- [86:28]
A
What happened happens next? We've got Brazil, we've got about three or four minutes left.
- [86:34]
B
What happens after 2013?
- [86:36]
C
Okay, so the project, so funding of the project. We had 5 million funding from the EU over four years plus 2 million that were thrown in by partners. You might understand that as Eve said, the project was not about building the app. It's not like there's a five minutes. But the app was a byproduct of, of a project we developed to produce some data. And the project is about something that was asked really developing models and an understanding of how the technology influences emergency situation and traffic situations. What happens after the project is that we actually continue other research projects, but also we have a spin off company that has been funded actually specifically to continue and to market and to develop the app. So that may be something that will continue it. And speaking about Brazil, we do have, as I said, EU project now proposal together with people from Brazil where it may be used, as we've seen in London, actually using things during Olympics is an extremely Complex thing because of marketing rights. And one of the problems of the app in London was actually that it was not allowed to be the official Olympics apps, but it was just marketing through the city, which of course meant to be. People are not using it much, so it's a good idea. The question how to get it there is much more complex than pure benefit.
- [87:54]
G
I'm trying to tackle the question from the lady there about effectiveness of emergency services deployment. If I got your question right, you were asking, so there's the flip side to people feeling safer with the app, which is how much is the app actually making them safer? So how effective is the app in helping you deploy resources quicker? But not only that, how capable is the different emergency service to do that deployment? Is that the right. Am I right? Is that your question?
- [88:25]
D
Good.
- [88:26]
G
So when it comes to the app, how we used to, in the lord mayor show, we had a multi agency coordination room. In the lord mayor show, we had the people responsible for deploying the police resources. In the lord show, where the people responsible for deploying the ambulance resources, the fire brigade resources, they were in direct contact with their dispatch. So with their control room that actually could say, send an ambulance to this point, send a police car to that point, send a fire track to that point, and they had visibility of the heat map, so they could use that to immediately inform their dispatch to say, okay, so this is where the problem is, can we dispatch some resources there? So I think hopefully that has addressed your question. So if you use it in that way, then it should be quite a useful tool and should be quite effective.
- [89:20]
B
What was interesting, in fact, was that we were watching CCTV camera footage, but only obviously in one small part, because you can only see one sort of camera at a time. We were also getting the reports from the stewards along the route, but it was only the app that was giving us overall what was happening around the entire route. And one of the interesting things, a little side issue here because of the Olympics, because of a lot of coordinates coordination work between the different services this year, or rather the 2012 control centre was organized in a totally different way from the 2011 one.
- [90:10]
G
And shall I say a better way by the 2011 corporation.
- [90:13]
B
Yes, yes. We were getting constant debriefs from everyone around the table and you could see how you could very, very quickly respond if there was any kind of incident, because we were getting the information from the police, from the ambulance, from fire, etc. Etc. So it really was quite impressive.
- [90:41]
G
And I guess that's the thing about our field of values. We try to. We do our best to learn from our past experiences and try to make sure that we incorporate that learning into our next experiences.
- [90:55]
A
Well, thank you all very much for your presentations. Can I thank the audience for your questions and participation? And can you join with me in thanking the panel and bringing this session to a close? Thank you.