Hurricane IrmaAI, citizen science, disaster response combine to help Hurricane Irma’s victims

A highly unusual collaboration between information engineers at Oxford, the Zooniverse citizen science platform, and international disaster response organization Rescue Global is enabling a rapid and effective response to Hurricane Irma.

The project draws on the power of the Zooniverse, the world’s largest and most popular people-powered research platform, to work with volunteers and crowd source the data needed to understand Irma’s path of destruction and the damage caused. Combining these insights with detailed artificial intelligence will support rescue relief organizations to understand the scale of the crisis, and deliver aid to those worst affected as soon as possible.

Irma is now judged to be the most powerful Atlantic storm in a decade, breaking previous extreme weather records and causing widespread destruction and death across the Caribbean. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced or made homeless, and well over a million are who lost critical services such as water and electricity. The disaster posed huge challenges for crisis response teams, who needed to assess as quickly as possible the extent of the destruction on islands spread over thousands of square miles, and ensure that the right aid gets to those in most need in the safest and most efficient way.

Oxford notes that in the immediate aftermath of Irma, Oxford researchers have been working round the clock in partnership with Rescue Global, a respected international crisis response charity, to help address this problem. The results have already supported Rescue Global to get aid delivered to some of the areas worst affected by Irma.

On 12 September the Zooniverse, which was founded by Oxford researchers, relaunched its Planetary Response Network (PRN). First trialed in the days following the Nepal earthquake of April 2015, the PRN aims to mobilize a “crowd” to assist in a live disaster that is still unfolding. Before, during, and in the days that followed Irma, thousands of volunteers from around the world joined the effort. Their role is to analyze “before” and “after” satellite images of the islands hit by Irma and identify features such as damaged buildings, flooding, blocked roads or new temporary settlements which indicate that people are homeless.