No. 421: Research agencies intensify their efforts to reduce and prevent disaster damage (January 27, 2012)

Business trend

Japanese research agencies intensify their efforts to develop IT-based technology and system for the prevention and reduction of disaster damage, reflecting the fact that the empirical rule did not work in the Tohoku earthquake on March 11, 2011. The Institute of Statistical Mathematics started to develop a new computation approach to estimate the scale of tsunami by combining such enormous data as geography and undulation of the sea bottom with observation results of sound waves generated by air quake caused by earthquake. It takes one hour to finish the computation at present, but it is trying to shorten the computation time to make the new approach effective for a possible huge earthquake in the future.

NationalInstitute of Informatics developed a system that collects information on the intensity of elements through mobile phones from many people and displays the information on a map instantaneously. It developed a website to allow people toconfirm how close a rainstorm is using a mobile phone, and plans to operate it on a full-scale toward this year’s typhoon season. National Institute of RadiologicalSciences (NIRS) is planning to construct a worldwide network with specialized agencies around the world to allow doctors to give precise diagnosis and treatment if a large-scale radiation contamination occurs. Using the approach to estimate the amount of contamination precisely with the help of the microscopic images of withdrawn blood, member agencies will be asked to analyze them in different places. NIRS will present this idea in the international conference scheduled for May in Great Britain.