Common Alerting Protocol – Workshop 2015

Agenda Item:
1.1 Welcome from National Fire Corps of Italy (ISA)

Gioacchino Giomi Head of the Italian National Fire Corps, holds a Masters degree in Civil Engineering, with post-graduate focus on ‘Analysis of Major Incident Risks’. He has been an official at the Firenze Provincial HQ and Commander of the Prato Provincial HQ. Other positions include: Director of the Chemical Lab at the Fire Research Centre; expert to the European Commission Building Committee; President of the Central Committee that surveyed the fire safety market; Manager of the Fire Safety Section of the National Fire Corps; Vice-Central Director for Fire Prevention and Technical Safety; Chief of Cabinet of the National Fire Corps; and, President of the Fire Resistance Committee of the Italian Organization for Standardization (UNI). More recently, he was Commander of the Roma Provincial HQ and Regional Director for Umbria. He has published more than 150 papers on workplace and fire safety issues and is an adviser to the Professional Engineer Association of Rome.

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1.2 Welcome from IFRC

Susil Perera works for the IFRC Head Quarters in Geneva as a Senior Officer, Climate Change Adaptation.  In his current position, he provides technical and coordination support to Red Cross Red crescent National Societies around the world and to IFRC on issues related to Climate Change, Disaster  Risk Reduction including and  Early Warning Systems. He also engaged in policy and advocacy work mainly on Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction.  Susil has over 20 years of experience as a Civil Engineer and a Manager working in different countries mainly in the Asia and Pacific in the fields of Water & Sanitation, Energy, Shelter, Disaster Management, Recovery, Risk Assessments, and Climate Change Adaptation.

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1.3 Welcome from ITU-D

Gisa Fuatai Purcell works for the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). She heads the Division that is responsible for ICT development for least developing countries (LCDs), (SIDS), and (LLDCs), Emergency Telecommunication and Climate Change Adaptation Division (LSE) of the Development Bureau. She is also responsible for ITU-BDT Study Question 8/2: Strategies and policies for the proper disposal or reuse of telecommunication/ICT waste material. Gisa holds a Master of Commerce and Administration from the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; with a major in telecommunication and information systems. Prior to joining ITU, Gisa was the Assistant Chief Executive Officer for the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Samoa after working as ICT and Financial consultant in Wellington, New Zealand for many years. 

Agenda Items:
1.4 Welcome from OASIS
3.10 TIES: Trusted Information Exchange Solutions
3.28 Update from OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee

Elysa Jones is an internationally recognized expert in Emergency Interoperability Communications via Data Messaging. Elysa is Chair of the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee since 2004. Her Committee developed and maintains the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Standard, which is also ITU recommendation X.1303. Additional standards for message distribution, resource messaging, hospital availability and tracking of emergency patients are products of her Committee. 

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1.5 Welcome from WMO

Sam Muchemi is the Scientific Officer, Public Weather Services (SO/PWS), WMO since 2006. He joined the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) in 1980 as a weather forecaster and later as a weather presenter on television for the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC). He was also in charge of the Public Weather Services Division of KMD.

Agenda Items:
2. Organization of the Workshop,
3.4 WMO Alert Hub,
4. Report of the Workshop

Eliot Christian is a consultant to and retired from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). He was a chief architect of the WMO Information System and the Global Earth Observations System of Systems (GEOSS). Eliot is also retired from, but remains a volunteer to, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) where he helped lead broad programs for environmental data sharing. For about 15 years he has been active in promoting CAP, especially internationally.

Agenda Item:
3.1 Early Warning System for Italian Civil Protection

Angela Corina is a senior engineer at Presidency of Council of Ministers, Civil Protection Department, and has fifteen years experience working in disaster risk reduction. She is an expert on early warning systems for hydrological forecasting and prediction, improving emergency preparedness and response, and policy development. She deals with development of new IT systems for meteo-hydrological events monitoring, has been appointed as Civil Protection National Focal Point for several national and international projects on risk management and mitigation, and is a member of the WMO Commission for Hydrology (CHy). 

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3.2 CAP in Cross-Agency Emergency Communications for Italy

Stefano Marsella graduated in civil engineering at Rome University La Sapienza. He has been working since 1988 in the National Fire Corps (CNVVF), within which he has held different positions in the provincial fire services of Florence, Venice and Treviso. He has directed the fire and rescue services of Arezzo and Perugia. He has been working in the central structures of the CNVVF in the activity of standardization and fire prevention, directing for several years, the information technology sector. He has published articles and books on fire safety engineering and the application of ICT to the rescue services. He is member of the NFPA committees 914 and 1616 (protection of cultural heritage, mass evacuation). He has coordinated the participation of CNVVF’s teams to the following projects co-financed by the European Commission: LIASON, REACT, MAP, IDIRA, SAVE ME, AF3. He currently leads the National Fire Academy (ISA).

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3.3 CAP Identifier Assignments in Italy

Silvio Cau  is Head of the Department for Meteorology at Operational Forces Command of the Italian Air Force. In 1985 he was appointed Lieutenant in the Italian Air Force, Aeronautical Engineering Corps. Colonel Cau then served in the Regional Meteorological Centre of Milan Linate, the 5th Allied Tactical Air Force in Vicenza, the Inspectorate for Telecommunications and Flight Assistance in the Plans and Programs Bureau, and in 1999 served at Operational Activities Bureau. From 2001 to 2007 he held various important positions in the Italian Joint Operational Headquarters, including Representative of the HQ in the Space Defence Programs Committee. In 2004 he earned the degrees of “Master in International Studies and Military Strategy” and Master in “Defence against Chemical and Biological Weapons”. From 2007 through 2015 he held senior management positions in telecommunication satellite systems and satellite remote sensing. Colonel Cau was born 1959 in Pisa. He is married and has 2 sons.

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3.5 Universal App Program 

Duncan Cook is the Managing Director of 3 Sided Cube. Based in Bournemouth, United Kingdom, the company is focused on building a talented team developing industry leading mobile applications, websites and web applications. In the last few years, 3 Sided Cube has had great successes including winning clients such as the British Red Cross, Boots, Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and the American Red Cross. Success in the mobile sector includes: #1 Apps in the UK, France & the Czech Republic; #2 Apps in the US & Ireland; #3 App in Australia; and, #1 Medical App in 90 Countries, The company has also won highly competitive awards in categories such as “Charity & Not for Profit”, “Best use of Technology”, “Best Mobile App”, and “Best use of digital”.

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3.6 FIA (Federation for Internet Alerts) Free Alert Hub

Jason Bier is Conversant’s Chief Privacy Officer, Representative of the Federation for Internet Alerts, and member of UNISDR’s Private Sector Alliance for Risk Sensitive Investment (AR!SE) U.S. MidWest Working Group. He is an attorney and serves on the Board of Directors of the U.S. Network Advertising Initiative, and the Principles and Communications Advisory Committee of the Digital Advertising Alliance. Jason was the recipient of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2013 Service Excellence Award for his efforts to protect consumers in the area of Internet privacy and has served as Conversant’s liaison to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children since 2011. Since 2010, he has been involved in repurposing online advertising technology to help alerting authorities notify the public during emergencies. He is married and has two children.

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3.7 The Weather Company (TWC) Local Alert Platform

Jason Geer is the Director of Product Management and Public-Private Partnerships for The Weather Company. He recently served as part of the US Delegation to the Seventeenth World Meteorological Congress (Cg-17) in Geneva and is supporting the WMO PWS Programme’s CAP initiative through The Weather Company’s Local Alerts Platform which enables each country’s authorized meteorological agency to create and distribute alerts to their citizens via the free cloud-hosted CAP alerting tool.

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3.8 AccuWeather and CAP

Jonathan Porter is Vice President of Innovation and Development for AccuWeather, a global media company providing high quality weather information for over a billion people around the world every day! Jon’s group is responsible for acquiring detailed and cutting-edge weather content from all over the world and integrating it into AccuWeather’s consumer-facing and business-to-business products. Jon has expertise in global weather data formats and weather information exchange, having worked in this area for many years. He frequently provides input to National Meteorological Services on best practices in delivering actionable information to users quickly and reliably in today’s digital world. He has been invited to visit and collaborate with many agencies all over the world and recently participated in the WMO Congress in Geneva, Switzerland. Jon is a graduate of Penn State University with a degree in meteorology and minor in information technology. He has been with AccuWeather since 2004.

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3.9 CAP support by Météo-France Group

Michael Claudon currently works inside Météo-France IT department as a developer and he is the CAP technical expert at Météo-France. He also works on web-services deployment via an enterprise service bus.

Christine Venzac is a Project Manager at Meteo France International, subsidiary of Meteo-France, indispensable in the design and implementation of integrated global meteorological projects. Christine is particularly in charge since 2010 of the Public Weather Services and Early Warning projects. Along her experience she has assisted several NMHS to develop their services capabilities towards their end-users and to implement public alerts using CAP standard to be disseminated widely.

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3.11 Pinkerton’s Use of CAP

Brian McNary has been actively involved in the intelligence community, claims investigations, contract security, and security consulting fields since 1987. An Arabic linguist and senior Middle East/North Africa analyst in the U.S. Navy’s elite Naval Security Group, McNary served as Special Evaluator for command staff of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, Central Command and Joint Task Force Middle East. As a designated Tactical Cryptologic Augmentee, McNary led signals intelligence missions aboard surface, subsurface and air platforms, and in high threat environs ashore. As a civilian, he has worked with government and private clients to design, implement or improve safety and security programs at special residences, educational campuses and CIKR facilities. He joined Pinkerton in 2009, and leads the company’s intelligence efforts under direction of its president.

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3.12 Update on Google Public Alerts

Meryl Stone joined Google in May 2004 as a direct report to Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and went on to become a founding member of Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm. Meryl has led strategy, development and partnerships for some of Google.org largest initiatives and products, including Inform & Empower, a governance and transparency initiative in India and East Africa; Google PowerMeter, a product to improve consumer awareness of energy usage; and Google for Nonprofits, a program to provide in-kind product donations to nonprofit organizations. In her current role as the head of partnerships for Google Crisis Response, Meryl develops government, nonprofit and commercial relationships in support of Google¹s emergency alerting, crisis maps, and Person Finder products. She has also managed the partnerships for over 20 of Google’s most acute responses (including Haiti Earthquake, Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Yolanda), while working to scale Google¹s ability to respond to future disasters.

Crystal Huang leads operations for Google’s Crisis Response team, where she supports partner adoption of the Common Alerting Protocol standard, manages new partner integrations with the Google Public Alerts platform, and analyzes user feedback. She joined Google in 2011 to incubate and scale support for payments and commerce partners. More recently, she also led partner data quality initiatives for Google’s Politics & Elections team. Crystal is a native of Mountain View, California, where Google is headquartered. She graduated from Brown University with degrees in economics and international relations.

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3.13 CAP in Earthquake Damage Messaging

Antonis Kostaridis received the Dipl.-Ing. degree from the University of Patras, Patras, Greece in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Athens, Greece, in 2004, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 2000-2004 he was a research associate in the Microwaves Laboratory of NTUA and in the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS). In 2006 he co-founded Satways Ltd. Since then he is the Technical Director of the company. He is leading the company products roadmap development and the delivery of commercial and European and National Research projects. Current efforts are centered around conformation of the company Emergency Management products and solutions towards the EDXL family of standards.

Dimitris Diagourtas has 23 years working experience in private, academic and public sectors. He received in 1991 his B.Sc. in Physics from the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens and since 1992 he was working as a researcher in the Seismological Laboratory of University of Athens for 14 years involved in research activities related mainly to engineering seismology, real time acquisition systems and earthquake early warning. In 2006 he co-founded Satways Ltd. and since then he is acting as Managing Director, with involvement in both commercial projects delivery as well as research activities focused in the domains of natural hazards crisis management systems where CAP is used to exchange info among emergency response Agencies and real time sensors systems development where CAP is used to send alerts to central command and control systems.

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3.14 PHAROS: A Multi-hazard Service Platform

Wim van Setten is Director of Stichting Platform Mobile Messaging, a not-for-profit research organization, based in The Netherlands and active in the applied research and the promotion of mass communication via mobile messaging solutions. Prior to this position, Wim worked at BackStream and at Hewlett-Packard. The EU project PHAROS aims at designing and implementing an innovative multi-hazard open service platform which integrates space-based observation, satellite communications and navigation (Galileo/GNSS).

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3.15 Interoperability of Legacy Systems at International Level

Daniele A. Galliano, electronic engineer, works for the EC since 2007 as a developer of IT solutions for Crisis Management. This role includes the design and the implementation of facilities like Crisis Room (notably the one of the Department of Civil Protection of Haitian Republic in Port-au-Prince) and the technical responsibility of the European Crisis Management Laboratory.

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3.16 Sahana CAP Implementations in Asia   

Nuwan Waidyanatha is a Sahana Software Foundation Director and has been affiliated since 2006. Currently he is the chief architect and he leads the roll-out of the CAP-enabled Sahana Alerting and Messaging Broker (SAMBRO) in the Maldives, Myanmar, and the Philippines. Nuwan has been working as a Senior Research Fellow with LIRNEasia since 2005, a regional pro poor pro market think tank. Nuwan has conducted several CAP related regional action research projects with LIRNEasia. Nuwan’s credentials are rooted in emergency communication and disaster management. Additionally, he works on short term assignments with the International Telecommunication Union in providing technical assistance in improving the emergency telecommunications of the member states.

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3.17 Alert-AS      

Alaor Moacyr Dall’Antonia graduated in Hydrographic Sciences from the Brazilian Naval Academy, with a post-graduate degree in Meteorology from the University of São Paulo. He was head of the Forecast Department for Marine Meteorology of the Hydrographic Service until 1996, responsible for disseminating weather forecasts and warnings to Brazilian coastal waters and METAREA V. From 1998 to the present, he has been employed at the National Institute of Meteorology of Brazil (INMET). Currently, he is Head of the General Coordination for Applied Meteorology, which coordinates the entire continental Weather Forecasts in Brazil. He is involved in developing a Meteorological Support System for the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. He is also involved in the Virtual Center for Severe Weather Warnings for the South of South America, called ALERT-AS. This new system has the capability to connect the National Weather Services of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

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3.18 CAP Implementation Status & Recommendations

Victor Massam is a computer systems analyst working with the Tanzania Meteorological Agency. He is involved in: Climatological Database Administration; Ensuring that new technical requirements are integrated with existing processes and skill sets; Preparing technical requirements; Interacting with designers to refine software requirements, and; Perform Computer programmings. He is also dealing Computer Security issues and Networking management.

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3.19 CAP in Environment Canada              

Norm Paulsen is a senior meteorologist with Environment Canada and one of the principle architects of the CAP Canadian Profile. He has expertise in alerting systems design, and has been thoroughly involved in warning message production since 1991. Norm has contributed to CAP in both Canada and the WMO; is an active participant in the OASIS technical and sub-committee groups working on the next CAP versions; and is currently the chair of the CAP Canadian Profile Standards Working Group. His current position involves analysis and strategic planning for alerting programs of Environment Canada as well as being a consultant to many Federal Government departments engaged in Public Alerting with CAP.

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3.20 China

Chunfang Wang is a senior engineer of meteorological information technology of China Meteorological Administration (CMA). She has more than 20 years of experience in meteorological communication system design, implementation and maintenance with specific emphasis on data broadcast and alert distribution. She has been a member of the GEONETCast Implementation group since 2009. She is also a drafter of CMA specifications for meteorological warning information encoding.

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3.21 Civil Protection of Regione Sicilia Case Study            

Calogero Foti is the Director General of the Regional Department of Civil Protection for Sicily. Since 2001 he held various positions at the Department of Civil Protection, including Regional Civil Protection for various Provinces, interim manager for regional seismic and other emergency studies, and manager of areas such as forecasting, prevention, monitoring and public works. He was born in Agrigento in 1955.

Massimo Cristaldi, graduated in Geology and specialized in Geophysics, is currently Chief Technical Officer of IES Solutions and business partner of the company. MC has worked in civil protection related projects linked to natural and environmental risk management as a researcher for the Italian National Council of research. He led software development projects and has been the technical coordinator for all IES internal activities in relevant EU projects such as LOCCATEC, REACT, VIEWFINDER, REACH112 and RESCUER. He was the Technical coordinator of the EU project IDIRA and since 2006, contributed to the adoption of the Common Alerting Protocol in Italy as member of OASIS. IES has won many innovation awards for emergency services interoperability, and creates solutions related to several aspects of emergency management and 112 adoption in Europe.

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3.22 Challenges on CAP Implementation in Cuba            

José Rubiera  is the Director of the National Forecast Center of the Institute of Meteorology, in Havana, Cuba. He is also Vice Chairman of the WMO Regional Association IV Hurricane Committee (North America, Central America and the Caribbean) since 1991. He is also a Member of the WMO Task Force Expert Team on Disaster Risk Reduction in WMO RA IV and was a Member of the WMO Expert Team on Meteorological Communication and Outreach for several years. He is a Full Professor at the School of Meteorology in Havana, Cuba. He has been awarded with the title of Doctor Honoris Causa at Las Villas Central University in Cuba. He is an active Member of the International Association of Broadcast Meteorologists (IABM). His work is aimed at operational weather forecasting, watch and warning processes in meteorological hazards and weather communication through the Media, mainly TV and radio.

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3.23 Europe: MeteoAlarm Update

Michael Staudinger, born 1954. Following study for PhD degrees from University Innsbruck Austria and Flinders South Australia, Michael joined ZAMG in 1983, and worked as weather forecaster. He was assigned responsibilities of the Regional ZAMG office for Salzburg and Upper Austria from 1997 to 2010. Since that year he is also responsible for the high altitude research Observatory Sonnblick and the Salzburg Avalanche warning centre. Since 2006 he is responsible for METEOALARM as a Program Manager in the framework of EUMETNET. Since 2010 he has been the Director of ZAMG, the Austrian national Meteorological Service.

Guido Schratzer is responsible for developing the software since 2005 for the European Weather Alert System (Meteoalarm) and CEO of backbone Internet Service GmbH in Salzburg (Austria). Guido Schratzer handles the Meteoalarm CAP Profile.

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3.24 CAP in Kenya

Roger Ndichu is the Meteorologist in charge of dissemination of weather and climate Information including weather warnings and advisories at the Kenya Meteorological Department.

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3.25 CAP Implementation in Mexico

Mario Alvaro Ruiz Velazquez is an advisor to the Centro de Instrumentación y Registro Sísmico and a specialist in Emergency Alert Systems. He holds a Master’s Degree in Computing Systems and his Ph.D. studies focus on Emergency Alert Systems and Crises Leadership. An information technology advisor in Safety and Warning Systems to various levels of government in Mexico, he participates in design, development and installation of the Mexican Earthquake Alert System (SASMEX) using EAS-SAME and CAP. He also works with academic, specialist and civil protection authorities in developing the Earthquake Warning System in California, USA.

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3.26 CAP in the Philippines        

Resly George Amador is assigned at the Techniques Application and Meteorological Satellite Section, Weather Division as a technical staff. One of the function of the Section is the development/maintenance of PAGASA website. Mr. Amador is also a core member of PAGASA Technical Working Group on Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) development team, which manages the public communication of weather related warnings and advisories via social media and CAP.