FLOEWS| A Flood of Ideas
Awards & Nominations
FLOEWS has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
A Flood of Ideas
FLOEWS 6D
Summary
“FLOEWS” is an all-round solution that monitors & forecast flood imminence, thereby, disseminates the hyper-forecast intelligence as warning to the flood vulnerable individuals, communities & economies, why? for early preparedness, awareness, emergency response, speedy recovery, strengthening path to overall resiliency.FLOEWS is dematerializing, demonetizing and democratizing access to social inclusive flood disaster management & early warning system to flood vulnerable individuals, communities & economies, towards reduction in devastation among lives, properties, utility & infrastructure, bio-diversity, food & water supply, economic losses estimated in $billions.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Problem:
Sa’ad Abubakar Asha, is a typical Mallam whose sale tea and bread in Suleja, Niger State, Nigeria, Sa’ad lost 2 of his wives and 6 children and his ancestral house to recent flooding disaster earlier in July 2017. WHY? because he lacks access to an early warning information & guidance about the impending disaster and foremost, he has no flood insurance to cover for his family & house lost.
As climate change persist so as its catastrophic adversity such as “flooding", individuals, communities and economies continue to get exposed and becomes vulnerable to such adversity and thereby cause huge devastation among lives, properties, utility & infrastructure, bio-diversity, food & water supply, economic losses estimated in $billions. Such vulnerable individuals & communities don't have access to a disaster management services & early warning system to prepare them against the impending disaster before it occurs, respond to emergencies during the occurrence, recover quickly after the disaster has strike and be resilient against its future occurrence.
Like Sa'ad, absence of a sustainable solution to bridge the gap between lack of access to a socially inclusive flood disaster management & early warning system has made flooding becomes major devastator with no or limited resiliency for centuries. It’s the most frequent natural disaster that affects the world with frequency of about 45% & accounting for 71% of all death related to natural disaster and also affecting about 5.4 Billion people globally & about 121 Millions flood vulnerable Nigerians. Alone, it a crippled Nations, states and communities wiped away years of infrastructural achievement, spread water-borne diseases, displace population & caused disaster-based migration, food insecurity and degrade fertile lands etc.
Communication is always important, but during a flooding disaster it becomes paramount (before, during & after).
In most flooding disaster, natural or man-made hydraulic structure failure, power can go out, internet & servers can go offline and systems like cellular & mobile networks can get overloaded or congested. This communication outage effectively means isolation. Gaps in centralized communications put lives and livelihoods at risk during such flooding disaster outbreak. In a reality that must soon contend with hundreds of millions of connected things, there can be no last mile internet connectivity to power an early warning system, leaving individuals, communities & economies more vulnerable to the adversity such disaster.
What did you develop? Why is it important? What does it do?
“FLOEWS” is an all-round solution that monitors & forecast flood imminence, thereby, disseminates the hyper-forecast intelligence as warning to the flood vulnerable individuals, communities & economies, why? for early preparedness, awareness, emergency response, speedy recovery, strengthening path to overall resiliency. Towards the reduction in devastation among lives, utility & infrastructure, bio-diversity, food & water supply & economic losses.
FLOEWS is digitizing, discepting & disrupting every impending flooding disaster activity, thereby, dematerializing the conventional huge traditional system into small, which reduces the material size & cost, thereby, demonetizing the system to be cheap, affordable & even free, which automatically democratizes the system to open, accessible across disaster vulnerable.
With such qualities in-place, “FLOEWS” will very important because it will be promoting social inclusiveness among individuals, communities & economies who are marginalized, under-served or totally don’t have such in-place, while providing them with equal access to low-cost & even free flood disaster management & early warning services, thereby bridging the gap between technological barrier, high-cost of ownership, climate-injustice & migration, access restriction which hindered them from owning or accessing such sustainable disaster early warning system.
What do you hope to achieve?
Using FLOEWS for effective monitoring, reporting & delivery of critical early warnings, two-way emergency response via a multichannel gateway means effective responding back to such critical emergencies which further meant early preparedness, awareness, less mortality & overall flood disaster risk reduction towards making the world safer, smarter & resilient place to continue living.
FLOEWS 6D Core Features:
1. FLOEWS Monitors flood disaster before the unfold using satellites data from NASA, ESA while augmenting Insitu data and a unique untapped meteorological data source harvested from wireless signals, connected devices, ground microwave signals, along with historical data sources from NASA DAAC to provide from , precise, accurate, near real-time, real-time location specific and on-demand flood forecasts, predict location to affected, the magnitude of the menace & further disseminate the warning information to most corresponding individuals, businesses, other vulnerable in a hassle-free manner.
2. FLOEWS bundled together with Twilio Flex API & Contact Center are utilized as to serve as a gateway assess FLOEWS services, to disseminate a multi-channel early warning and respond to emergency responses & guidance. FLOEWS supports internetless as a peer-to-peer or a IoT based Mesh Network to be deployed at within equal proximity radius connecting between a feed internet gateway through the MESH Network and made available as an open network running FLOEWS-6D software on, which can be connected by the victims phone via WIFI or can be connected as an open Intra-MESH network between active victims so as to help each other. FLOEWS Flood Reporter is another evidence-based flood reporting tool developed to work with or without internet, its main function is to report real-time or near real-time occurrence of flood or damages caused by it to critical infrastructure. It’s both a mobile app & can be access as a web-based app made accessible using a QR, publicize across streets, roads, media etc.
3. FLOEWS utilized on its effective monitoring capability cutting edge high-resolution post flood disaster satellite & drone imagery, processed & delivered on FLOEWS platform, performing change detection by overlaying the before and after flooding imagery of such location so as to easily visualize and understand changes that occur while making comparison and knowing the critical infrastructure & other assets affected. FLOEWS can further support the employment computer vision & machine learning (ML) by training numerous training samples for buildings, infrastructures & utilities destructed by flooding of which are classified according to level of damage severity. Having the algorithm learnt from the training samples, it’s further capable of extracting insight & pattern from the imagery as a feature count of damage assets or its interpreted into an actionable insight for effective claim & decision-making information portrayed as a feature extract of each building, infrastructure & utilities categorizing them according to damage severity by percentage, while communicating the information to the registered insurance partners, first respondent, humanitarian support organization & Governmental authorities in-charge.
4. Flood Disaster Resilience entails ability to a democratized & socially inclusive tool like FLOEWS-6D at the finger-tips of flood vulnerable individuals, communities & economies so as to encourage early preparedness, awareness, two-emergency response & quick recovery. We can’t stop the Flood from occurring total but we can have location & disaster intelligence work well for us by providing us with actionable insight enough to understand & knowing where, when, who & how the flood is going to affects us, its extent & magnitude so as to prepare early towards overall reduction in the flood risk.
How We Developed This Project
What inspired your team to choose this challenge?
We are a team of unique diversity with skillset, expertise and with ability to try, fall, learn, try and continue trying again, and above all we possess a unique passion for helping solve among earths most pressing environmental challenges & natural disaster (flooding) & it’s sustainability. With a core background in geography and environmental management technology while synchronizing ICT, software development, critical thinking, problem framing & solving skills, sustainable solution engineering & evaluation at our disposal gave us an exponential & disruptive advantage being the right team to develop the right solutions so as to help make the world safer, smarter & resilient to continue living.
What was your approach to developing this project?
Just imagine if…
We can have a sustainable solution to bridge the gap between lack of access to a socially inclusive flood disaster early warning system, which has accounted for about 71% of all death related to natural disaster across 5.4Billion globally, 121 Nigerians.
Just imagine if….We can digitalize, dicept & disrupt every impending flood disaster activity, thereby, dematerializing the conventional huge traditional system into small, which reduces the material size & cost, thereby, demonetizing the system to be cheap, affordable & even free, which automatically democratizes the system to open, accessible across disaster vulnerable individuals, communities via the must corresponding multichannel gateway.
“FLOEWS” flood early warning system, is an all-round solution that monitors & forecast flood imminence, thereby, disseminates the forecast as warning to the flood vulnerable individuals, communities & economies, why? for early preparedness, awareness, emergency response, speedy recovery, strengthening path resiliency. Towards the overall reduction in devastation among lives, valuable properties, utility & infrastructure, bio-diversity, waterborne epidemic, food/water supply, economic losses estimated in $Billions.
We developed FLOEWS with a core values "Social Inclusion" which makes it distinctively unique & different from others competitors, an ability to bridge in the gap between social inclusiveness, high-cost of ownership, implementation, unequal access, uneven skill/expertise, inefficient monitoring, untimely dissemination of warnings, by providing access to a low-cost yet affordable & even free dematerialized, demonetized, democratized flood early warning system services to the flood vulnerable individuals, communities, enterprise & government via the most suitable & corresponding multichannel for disseminating the flood warning.
Therefore, we leverage on peta-bytes of earth’s observation datasets from NASA, ESA, CNES Satellites, hydro-meteorological Insitu’s and an untapped unique meteorological data source harvested from wireless signals, which are computed together using a powerful GPU and with an industry standard hydrological model, analyze with an artificial intelligence (AI) & machined learning (ML), with the final derived insight being disseminated as an early warning to FLOEWS customers/beneficiaries via a multi-channel gateway especially, with or without internet connectivity and mobile penetration accessible via an intelligent & scalable decentralized off-grid mesh network, while also augmenting traditional communications mediums.
FLOEWS is replicable, can be customized & tailored to fit both new and existing organizational infrastructure & workflow, at the same time without owning the conventional huge infrastructure, or having high-end servers, GPU’s & autonomous/connected IoT sensors, or possess skillset/expertise needed to implement & manage the such infrastructure, nor access to data from reliable sources to help forecast impending floods accurately, or coordinating a physical contact centers for disseminating the warnings.
What tools, coding languages, hardware, software did you use to develop your project? What problems and achievements did your team have?
Tools
1. Hardware:
a. Lenovo IdeaPad 110 Series Laptop
b. iPhone 8Plus mobile phone & Infinix Zero Android for Phone for testing & running FLOEWS mobile apps.
c. Raspberry Pi 3 for building IoT based Mesh Network.
2. ArcGIS for Desktop 10.8.1
a. ArcGIS Pro 2.6.
3. ArcGIS Online for Organization
a. ArcGIS Online for Organization WebMap: SaaS version of ArcGIS for Desktop.
b. ArcGIS for Developers: ArcGIS Runtime API, ArcGIS API for JavaScript.
c. ArcGIS Experience Builder: for developing Hybrid 2D/3D Map-Based WebApps.
d. ArcGIS WebApp Builder: for developing standalone2D & 3D Map-Based WebApps.
e. ArcGIS Dashboard: for summarizing & visualizing, trends, patterns & insight inform of metric & charts.
f. ArcGIS Insight: for GIS Analytics
g. ArcGIS Business Analyst: for Business Analytics & infographs.
h. ArcGIS Storytelling
i. ArcGIS App Studio: for developing cross-platform web/mobile/desktop map-based apps
4. Sentinel Application Platform (SNAP)
5. Visual Studio Enterprise 2017: Integrated Development Environment.
6. SQL Server Management Studio 2016: for RDBMS for ArcGIS Distributed GeoDB.
7. Adobe Creative Cloud: Photoshop, XD, Fireworks, Illustrator & InDesign CC: responsible for graphical design, mockup & UI/UX.
8. Languages & Frameworks: X++, QML, Python, R, SQL, Arcade, VB Expression & Query, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, GML etc.
What problems and achievements did your team have?
1. Limited time frame for the SpaceApp Challenge project to be implemented timely.
2. Funding.
3. Remote location.
4. Space technology & innovation not perceived worthy or recognized among all team members and among Nigerian innovators in a whole.
Teams FLOEWS Achievements:
1. Finalist Obama Initiative for Climate Resilient Innovation Challenge 2014.
2. Finalist ESRI Data visualization Challenge 2014.
3. Finalist Copernicus Masters-DLR Energy, Health, Environment Category 2016.
4. Finalist NSDIC Primary Healthcare Innovation Challenge by PHN/NHIM 2017.
5. UN SDG Influx Trust Challenge 2017 Continental Winner.
6. Among 28 Global Winners for UN SDG Influx Trust Challenge 2017.
7. Among 1000 UN Talent 2018.
8. Among 1000 UN Unleash Innovation Lab Challenge Denmark 2017.
9. Finalist Singularity University Global Impact Challenge West Africa 2017.
10. Among 20 finalists for Collective Global Accelerator London 2017.
11. Finalist 1776 Challenge Cup, Nigeria 2017.
12. Finalist Facebook DevCircle Challenge, Lagos 2018.
13. Winner Lagos Innovates: Secure Lagos Innovation Challenge 2018.
14. 1st Runners Up Actin Space Challenge 2018, Lagos.
15. Winner SpaceApp Challenge Jos 2018.
16. Winner BTNG & WECODE Hackathon 2018 “Solving the problems of running successful elections in Emerging Economies”.
17. Finalist Sensi Health Hackathon on Risk Communication for Emergencies & Epidemics, 2018.
18. 2nd Runner up HackJos 2018.
19. Winner VilSquare Makers-Hub National Series Hackathon, Kano 2018.
20. Finalist KadHack by GRID3 E-Health Africa, 2018.
21. Fellow Tony Elumelu Foundation, 2018.
22. Fellow GIZ for African innovators, 2018.
23. Honorable mentioned as one of the best innovations for IBM Call for Code 2018.
24. Pitch at Innovate4Climate in Singapore late 2019.
25. National Finalist Accelerate 2030, 2019.
26. Global Finalist Accelerate2030 Geneva, 2019.
27. Takeda Foundation Nominee for Social Good Innovation 2019.
28. Among 10 Regional Finalist to be Sponsored by NITDA for GITEX Dubai Expo, 2019.
29. Among 20 Selected for NITDA OIIE Pitch, Expo, Conference 2019.
30. Finalist Alibaba GetGlobal Challenge 2020.
31. Among Top 60 Finalist for Africa50 Innovation Challenge 2020.
32. National Winner Word Summit Award (WSA) 2020 Environmental Category.
Project Demo
Link to Slide presentation:
https://floewshub-smartfloews.hub.arcgis.com
Link to DEMO
Credentials: for Login
Username: SmartFLOEWS.
Password: Bashmax26