Opening Remarks – Christopher Vaughan (Geo4Dev 2018)

Chris Vaughan serves as the FEMA Geospatial Information Officer where he champions and coordinates geospatial technologies across multiple response and recovery programs. In order to meet strategic goals and priorities, Chris works effectively across federal, military, state, local, and tribal communities to promote geospatial programs, technology, and institutional structures and share best practices.

Mr. Vaughan has a Master of Science in Counseling Psychology from Lee University and is a graduate of American University’s Key Executive Leadership Certificate Program.

Chris Vaughan’s key note is titled: FEMA’s Hurricane Incident Journal: A Web Application Supporting Event-Specific Decision Support: For emergency managers, government officials, and others who must respond to rapidly changing natural disasters, timely access to detailed information related to affected terrain, population and infrastructure is critical for planning, response and recovery operations. Accessing, analyzing and disseminating such disparate information in near real-time are critical decision support components. However, finding a way to handle a variety of informative yet complex datasets poses a challenge when preparing for and responding to disasters. Here, we discuss the implementation of a web-based data integration and decision support tool for hurricanes developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as a solution to some of these challenges.

The 2nd Annual Symposium on Geospatial Analysis for International Development (Geo4Dev) focused on geospatial research that addresses climate- and conflict-driven migration and humanitarian response. This includes observation and modeling of migration and human settlement patterns (in response to climate or conflict stressors), as well as the design and evaluation of interventions for humanitarian crises, mass migration, and community resilience.

Geo4Dev is a yearly event focused on the use of novel geospatial data and analytic techniques to address issues of poverty, sustainable development, urbanization, climate change, and economic growth in developing countries and beyond. This includes a particular emphasis on the use of emerging geo-tagged big data, including satellite, social media, and CDR datasets.