Science and Technology for Supporting Decisions in Natural Disasters | Bijan Khazai | TEDxKIT

Disasters such as earthquakes, typhoons and floods have devastating impacts on a community’s ability to thrive. Actionable decisions to prepare for, respond to and recover from natural disasters require a personalized understanding of risk. Most existing catastrophe risk assessment models consume huge amounts of time and data and are costly to use. They are commonly applied for assessment of high-value facilities, but numerous small and medium enterprises throughout disaster prone regions typically do not have the capacity and financial means to employ these modeling tools and services. Opening up risk models to a wider community and communicating risk outputs in a way that is useful to ordinary citizens and businesses can play a pivotal role in being better prepared for natural disasters.

Dr. Bijan Khazai is a research scientist at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology’s (KIT) Center for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology (CEDIM). He holds Masters and Doctoral degrees in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, where he worked on developing GIS-based landslide hazard assessment models in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Khazai’s research interests are social vulnerability analysis, megacity and urban risk, and information technology for post-disaster recovery planning. As a project specialist for Earthquake and Megacities Initiative (EMI), he has worked in a number of applied projects in Istanbul, Amman and Metro Manila and Mumbai.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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