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Digital Planet: Digital Emergency Responders

Factual: Science & Nature

Residents clear debris near the shoreline on November 23, 2013 in Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines

26/11/2013

Digital Emergency Responders

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, Digital Emergency Responders

The digital humanitarian workers making sense of crisis information to help relief effort

The digital humanitarian workers making sense of crisis information to help relief effort; the new smart parking system to help drivers find a space; Europe's Robotics Week

In the event of a large-scale emergency, a growing number of digital volunteers are lending their expertise and their time to map the crisis areas, to feed in photos and tweets and mine other social networks to build up a picture that may be of help to the humanitarian responders on the ground. But are these volunteers a help or a hindrance? Click talks to Patrick Meier, director of innovation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute about the next generation of humanitarian technologies. 

Smart Parking
Finding a car park is one of the hassles of owning a car - and if you believe the people selling the latest car parking apps, we spend more than 100 days of our lives looking for the perfect parking spot. Frogparking has developed a smart parking system that tells drivers where they can park, gives property owners real time information so they can manage their parking spaces to make the most money, and alerts traffic wardens when a ticket needs to be issued. Simon Morton meets Don Sandbrook from Frogparking in Auckland, New Zealand to find out how sensors embedded in roads can make parking smarter.

European Robotics Week
Robots are increasingly finding their way out of the laboratory and into our homes. As the European Union embarks on a week of celebrating robots in development, Click hears from the EU’s Ryan Heath about some of the highlights. They include a robot that can flip pancakes and another modelled on an elephant’s trunk.

(Photo: Residents clear debris near the shoreline on November 23, 2013 in Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines © Getty Images)

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