COVID-19 Real-Time Crisis Management Platform Coordinates Data-Driven Emergency Response

By AIT News Desk On May 12, 2020

Disaster Tech and Kinetica Arm Emergency Response Teams With a Comprehensive Data Platform Powered by NVIDIA, Combining More Than 30 Government, Public Health, and Private Sector Sources to Deliver Up-To-Date Intel Such as Hospital Capacity and Testing Kit and Equipment Availability

Kinetica and Disaster Tech announced the release of the COVID-19 Real-time Crisis Management Platform to aggregate and track data relevant to the COVID-19 emergency response today. The platform is able to combine current data, such as hospital capacity and diversion status, locations of alternative medical sites, state-wide declarations, testing kit quantities, and protective equipment availability at a local level, for example. The platform functionality is the direct result of a survey of emergency managers and emergency responders across disciplines, and blends data from 30 different government, public health, and private sector sources.

“Emergency responders do not have days or hours to mine through hundreds of data sources in a crisis,” said Roger Coleman, President & Chief Strategy Officer at Disaster Tech. “They need real-time data in one place to make important decisions quickly, whether identifying sites for triage centers or determining how many test kits to send out.”

Disaster Tech is a public benefit corporation that builds technology to analyze, visualize, and communicate risk, on a mission to accelerate decision-making to save lives, protect the environment, and reduce risk to communities and critical infrastructure. The company was founded by CEO Sean Griffin, who served in the Federal government for 13 years, which included service as Director for Incident Management Integration Policy at the White House National Security Council (NSC) for President Obama and President Trump.

“Our team is removing barriers to those who serve by providing the most advanced technologies for making the best decisions to save lives and protect communities,” said Sean Griffin, CEO, Disaster Tech. “Those serving the most vulnerable deserve and require the best tools to support risk mitigation and life-saving decision-making.”

Disaster Tech’s platform is intended for emergency responders, serving a separate purpose from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center dashboard, which provides an essential public record of up-to-date caseload, deaths, and recoveries across geographies. Using Kinetica, the COVID-19 Real-Time Crisis Management Platform aggregates and tracks real-time streaming data in order to make immediate emergency response decisions.

With conventional processors, it took 60 hours to analyze streaming data in emergency scenarios, rendering data-driven decisions obsolete. Running the Disaster Tech platform on NVIDIA GPUs, Kinetica enables emergency planners and responders to react dynamically to these huge datasets.

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“The critical decisions that are being made by both policy makers and first responders need to be based on dynamic data-driven insights,” said Paul Appleby, CEO, Kinetica. “The COVID-19 Real-Time Crisis Management Platform delivers powerful intelligence that government and public health agencies can leverage immediately in order to minimize transmission, treat the sick, and provide essential services to all those affected medically and economically.”

Disaster Tech is making the COVID-19 Real-Time Crisis Management Platform available as a public service to ensure public health and emergency management agencies have access immediately. The publicly available version is specifically for use within the United States, is equipped with standard filters including a Twitter sentiment data option, and is embeddable. Public agencies can also register to access the platform privately, in order to upload their own public and private data sets without publicly divulging sensitive information about their communities. Users can take even a simple spreadsheet and visualize it on the platform.

“Because tackling a global pandemic is such a complex task, it is essential to combine data from many sources to get the most up-to-date, relevant information to help disparate groups of people work together across geographies,” said Stephan Mergenthaler, Head of Strategic Intelligence at the World Economic Forum. “Disaster Tech and Kinetica are generating insights from myriad sources of data that emergency responders can act on.”

The COVID-19 Real-Time Crisis Management Platform is the product of collaboration across the technology, public sector, and public health communities. It is built on Microsoft Azure, using NVIDIA GPUs to power the Kinetica platform’s instantaneous, high-fidelity visualization and location intelligence. The Kinetica Active Analytics Platform gives Disaster Tech the ability to support tens of thousands of users so that entire emergency response teams have simultaneous access to up-to-the-moment information.

“Accurate data is essential to helping communities respond in times of crisis,” said Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA. “Using the power of NVIDIA GPUs and Kinetica Active Analytics to speed up analysis, the COVID-19 Real-Time Crisis Management Platform is able to aggregate massive data sets in real-time to give emergency planners and other leaders the comprehensive intelligence they need to do their invaluable work.”

The platform is designed to respond not only to the novel coronavirus, but to share a wide swath of relevant data across emergency response teams in future disasters, from weather to health to security threats and beyond. What is learned in this crisis can be leveraged to plan and prepare for future emergencies.

In addition to the launch of the COVID-19 Real-Time Crisis Management Platform, Disaster Tech has partnered with World Hope on an initiative called Get Support to offer additional resources directly to individuals who need help in this crisis. Kinetica is contributing to the World Economic Forum’s COVID Action Platform and is a member of the Forum’s Global Innovators Network.