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Open Days

Mini World: Global Security and Crisis Management

The Unit for Global Security and Crisis Management is working in many areas of the world to provide support in preventing, preparing for, responding to or assessing crises situations. These issues are represented by a series of installations in an open area on the JRC site, which speak to the imagination of Open Day visitors of all ages.

Visitors can learn about the Unit’s activities by walking through this open air museum and by visiting the Situation Centre. In addition, the Mini World will also serve to demonstrate several technologies used in the Unit: eye tracking software and field based data collection.

This website is currently only used for internal preparations, but will be used later to explain our activities.

The following activities will be demonstrated:

• Situation Room: the situation room has a large videowall on which several of JRC's systems will be shown live, as well as output from various experiments (e.g. eye-tracking, geocaching, etc.). The scheduled talks are:
  • Japan Tsunami: early warning for humanitarian disasters
    “Red tsunami alert: wave height of 11m”. This SMS, sent from JRC, arrived after 20 minutes on 15000 phones of emergency managers worldwide, prompting them to prepare for international assistance to Japan. We’ll show how JRC combines live information from many organisations and calculates in real-time the tsunami propagation.
  • Viewing the fragility of our world from space
    In the next 40 years, an extra 3 billion people will live somewhere on Earth. Where will they live? Most likely, on the outskirts of megacities, in slum-like conditions, in countries like India, China and Nigeria. These people are very vulnerable to natural disasters, but no one knows where they live exactly. The Global Human Settlements Layer (GHSL), developed by JRC, will soon provide this detailed information for the first time on a global scale. A new advanced algorithm that can run on fast computers makes it possible to monitor the changes in human settlements regularly. We’ll show how JRC can detect even small villages in the middle of African forests.
  • The World Today: using the power of the Internet to know what’s going on
    From pandemics to volcanic eruptions, from revolutions to nuclear emergencies, information is available on the Internet in the news, blogs and social media. Detecting new events, following stories over time and using all this information to get a comprehensive overview of what’s going on today is a challenge taken up by JRC. We’ll show how JRC is extracting knowledge from the Internet and, for example, helping the World Health Organisation for monitoring disease outbreaks.
    
    
• 10:00    Talk 1    Japan Tsunami: early warning for humanitarian disasters
• 11:00    Talk 2    Viewing the fragility of our world from space
• 12:00    Talk 3    The World Today: using the power of the Internet to know what's going on
• 13:00    Talk 1    Japan Tsunami: early warning for humanitarian disasters
• 14:00    Talk 2    Viewing the fragility of our world from space
• 15:00    Talk 3    The World Today: using the power of the Internet to know what's going on
• 16:00    Talk 1    Japan Tsunami: early warning for humanitarian disasters
  
• Satellite images:
  • Eye tracking Experiment : Children perform the role of a photo-interpreter involved in a damage assessment and will be asked to find the destroyed buildings in different satellite images. Eye movements will be recorded and analyzed. The overlay of all eye-tracking results of the day will slowly build a heatmap of where children saw destroyed buildings, which should match with the true location of damage.
    • Schedule: continuous activity of 15 minutes (maximum 15 people per experiment, one child doing the experiment)
  • T-SORT: JRC created software to automatically understand satellite images of human settlements. Using the sliders of T-SORT, it is possible to sort all the tiles according to parameters such as number, size or height of buildings. In this way, visitors can find in an intuitive way images of slums, poor areas, rich areas, industrial areas, etc.
    • Schedule: continuous activity
      
      
• Modelling for natural disasters and epidemiology
  • How do infectious diseases spread?: A hands-on experiment using coloured balls, showing how infections propagate. This will be accompanied by a computer simulation of disease propagation.
    • Schedule: 11:00 - 15:00 (activity of 30 minutes, starting on the hour = 5 times)
  • Create your own tsunami: A hands-on experiment to understand how tsunami waves propagate in the ocean.
    • Schedule: 10:00 - 16:00 (activity of 30 minutes, starting each 30 minutes = 12 times)
      
      
• Media monitoring
  • NewsDesk: Visitors can create their own newsletter based on EMM searches or other feeds. Visitors will get a printed copy of their newsletter.
    • Schedule: continuous activity (maximum 10 people in the room, two groups of 5 for one PC)
      
      
• In the field
  • Geocaching: using GPS to find something?
    • Schedule: 10:00 - 16:00 (activity of 45 minutes = 8 times)
      
• At school
  • Teaching activity at European School: In the theme of "Force of Nature", scientist from our Unit went in several classes to explain some of their work. The art work of the School's art programme with the theme of "Force of Nature" will be exposed at our Open Day. Donations will be collected for a concrete project (a school in Botswana).
    
• 3D globe
  • Some of the work of the Unit will also be shown on a 3D rotating globe in Room 3. The global will show information related to natural disasters, including the tsunami simulation for the recent Japanese tsunami.