Author: Ilias Koulalis

The Final Review meeting of the beAWARE EU project was held on 25 - 26 February 2020 in Brussels and was successfully completed with an Excellent Rating. The project was officially launched in January 2017 and was completed in December 2019. The main objective of beAWARE was to develop a platform to support all the phases in a crisis management sequence. This platform collects heterogeneous data from several sources such as weather data, social media, input from drones, and sensors but most importantly it involves people / first responders and citizens who become active subjects in the process by sending visual reports, audio and text messages via a dedicated mobile application. The collected data is analysed and critical information is extracted and synthesized, to provide decision support services to the…

Dear followers, dear friends, our seventh newsletter is online!! Find out about beAWARE project implementation activities, like the 2nd Online presentation of beAWARE Platform and its upgrade, project plenary meeting in Barcelona. Our partners have been very active last six months participating on various major events, like ISCRAM 2019, ECCA 2019 (EU Disaster risk reduction policies), IFAFRI (International Forum to Advance First Responder Innovation) Industry day, CAP 2019 (Common Alerting Protocol Workshop) and Explorer’s night 2019. In this edition, you can be informed about our planned activities as also you can find many beAWARE project related issues, like news and reports about an extremely hot and severe summer 2019 for Europe, where heatwaves, thunderstorms, wildfires and floods, have reached new records.

The next Plenary meeting of beAWARE will take place on Tel Aviv, Israel, on 10-12 December 2019. The agenda will be announced early enough and will be posted on project website and social media. Stay tuned !!!

The next beAWARE project Pilot will occur forest fires and it will be deployed at Valencia, Spain, on 12-14 November 2019. Together with Bomberos Ayuntamiento València, Beredskab Øst and CERTH, we are planning a simulation of a forest fire in La Devesa de El Saler area. Here we will test our platform!  Appropriate media campaign will reach relevant stakeholders, as also beAWARE project specific Network of Interest (NOI). Our project staff will keep you informed, sending correspondences during Pilot implementation. Please visit regularly our website and stay tuned !!!

CERTH has joined Mediterranean Security Event 2019, took place in Fodele, Crete, Greece, from 29th to 31th of October 2019. For the event program please follow the link: https://mse2019.kemea-research.gr/about/program/. Dr. Anastasios Karakostas, presentation had the title “beAWARE: The Crisis Classification component to strengthen the early warning, risk assessment and decision support in extreme climate events”

On 16th to 18th of October 2019, our partner PLV, has participated in the Common Alerting Protocol Workshop 2019, that took place at Mexico City, Mexico, hosted by the Mexico City Secretariat of Integral Risk Management and Civil Protection. You can access the Programme of Workshop  HERE.

On Tuesday 15th October 2019, beAWARE members have participated at IFAFRI (International Forum to Advance First Responder Innovation) Industry day in Brussels, Belgium. beAWARE project has been presented under “Gap9: The ability to create actionable intelligence based on data and information from multiple sources.” To see the full agenda, please visit the webpage HERE.

"Researcher's Night" is a European Union initiative aimed at familiarizing the public with the world of research. Every year, on the last Friday of September, "Researcher's Night" events are organized throughout Europe. Greece is consistent in its appointments, continuously organizing events since the institution's inception in 2005. This year in Thessaloniki on 27th September 2019, "Researcher's Night" was hosted on Thessaloniki Concert Hall (M2). CERTH participated as co-organiser and beAWARE project was demonstrated in a dedicated desk. For more information, please access HERE (in Greek).

Just like after our first pilot, an online presentation to the public took place. Benefiting from the experienced gained on 2nd Pilot which was based on a flood scenario that took place in Vicenza, Italy, we prepared two online presentations to present the 2nd version of the beAWARE Platform, one in Italian (20/9/2019) and one in English (8/10/2019). Those presentations were attended by many interested parties, which at the end, set questions asking for more information about the use of beAWARE platform solutions, the role of end users and the benefits while applying such innovations. beAWARE social media followers have been informed with relevant posts in English, Italian and Greek, early enough to be engaged. Online presentations were consisted by two parts; on the first the Lead partner, CERTH, presented…