Project: Natural Disaster Broadcast Language Translation System

Team Members:

• Donna Dulo, Project Lead

•  Jinchen Duan

• Zhetian Xie

• David Sung

• Saloni Sahni

• Joan Yi

• Sai Anugna Naguboyina

• Joseph Newman 

Summary:

Natural disasters are rapidly developing and require immediate instructions to people living in the affected area. However, in many cases, emergency instructions in the United States are broadcast in English only, or English and Spanish. With diverse populations, including recent immigrants, many in the population are left out of vital, precise emergency communications, leaving them vulnerable when seconds count.

The Natural Disaster Broadcast Language Translation System mobile/web-based application will provide instant, internally generated precise translations in a myriad of languages to ensure that all members of the affected area are properly alerted in near-real-time to help save lives and protect the members of the community from undue injury. With an intuitive interface, emergency messages can be quickly generated in multiple precise language translations and used immediately by the emergency broadcast radio, HAM radio, and TV, as well as by police, fire, and emergency personnel.

Accomplishments of the Team at the Hackathon

1. Team formation and introductions with team building

2. Discussion and orientation to the project

3. Set of requirements developed (Requirements Specification Document)

4. A Concept of Operations (CONOPS) document was developed

5. Foreign Language assessment report was developed and the initial languages were selected as well as the second set. Foreign language teams were formed for the foreign language research and for the acquisition of more team members for the second set of languages

6. An Emergency Disaster Research Team was formed to do the emergency disaster and terminology research

7. The technology platforms were researched and the top platforms were selected by team members based on platform relevance, viability, and team member knowledge base.

8. Technology teams were formed to begin development of the initial prototype and to recruit members for the myriad technical areas

9. A leadership team was formed with a software systems engineer and a project manager to be guided by the project lead.

10. A development website plan was developed for team communications and documentation. The team decided not to utilize a commercial platform, but to develop their own.

11. Many team discussions and meetings were held to encourage cooperation, understanding, and empathy among all team members. Team members are natives of China, India, Germany, and the United States. The team also had diversity discussions to facilitate empathy and teamwork.

12. A recruitment team was also formed to help get other Sofia students involved in the project including students from the Business and Psychology departments.

13. The team had a meeting on the importance of transpersonal and transformative principles to fulfill Sofia University’s goal and motto of “Moving Humanity Forward”.

14. The team also had a meeting on the importance of climate change and to always have this issue in the back of their minds while developing the product.

Project Goals Developed by the Team

1. To develop an easy to use application to send out rapid, near real time emergency broadcasts in myriad languages to save lives and resources during emergencies.

2. To give computer science students, who are mostly new to technology, real life experience in developing software applications in a team environment and experience in a Hackathon environment to reinforce sound software engineering and coding principles as well as project management skills, technical writing skills, and sound research skills.

3. To forward Sofia University’s goal and motto of “Moving Humanity Forward” through a climate change and humanitarian based software product.

4. To continue as a Capsule Project with the Sofia University Computer Science Innovation Club, allowing more students to become involved throughout the year.

5. To donate the finished project to the world, free of charge, and to maintain the product into the future as a web application and a mobile application.

Project Motivation:

I was in emergency services for over 15 years and saw first hand the lack of emergency communications to vulnerable populations and have done considerable research into this area to see that rapid emergency communications are vital in a myriad of languages. Yet, to assemble linguists and complete translations is time-consuming and non-productive once the emergency has happened.

Being a software developer, I envision this application to be a major tool in near-real-time emergency broadcasts in all relevant regional languages of the disaster. I also would like this to be an application that is donated to the world, free of charge for both the application and maintenance of the application. I also envision the application to include most of the world languages, so the application can be utilized worldwide. The application will be an addition to the tools for society to remain safe during emergencies generated by climate change and natural disasters.

Sustainable Development Goals:

• Good Health and Well-Being

• Reducing Inequality

• Climate Action

• Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Life on Land

Skills & Resources Needed:

I | Expertise in the following foreign languages:

a. Spanish

b. Tagalog

c. Vietnamese

d. Japanese

e. Swahili

f. Amharic

g. French

II | Expertise in the following areas of emergency disaster management and research:

a. Wildland and Structural Fires

b. Hurricanes, Typhoons, Monsoons

c. Landslides/Avalanches

d. Tidal Wave

e. Hazardous Material Spills (Manmade but causing natural damage)

f. Insect or Wildlife Invasion

g. Volcano Eruption

h. Large Meteor Incident

i. Severe Weather – Hale, Snow, etc.

j. Intensive Solar Flare

III | Expertise in the following technology areas:

a. Utilization of Node.js, and React as the web platform tools

b. Utilization of Python as the primary language and JavaScript as the secondary language

c. Utilization of MongoDB as the NOSQL platform

d. Utilization of NLTK as the primary Natural Language Processing library

e. Development of a unique NLP pipeline tailored to the application

f. Development of a set of unique NLP and ML algorithms utilizing various mathematical and statistical techniques for accurate NLP analysis

Post-Capsule Goals:

• Hobby Project

• University Partnership or Collaboration