Ogie, Robert Ighodaro.

Robert brings an Engineering and Information Systems background to the multidisciplinary field of disaster informatics, where his interest is to deliver innovative means by which information and emerging technologies can be used to improve decision making during the prevention, preparation, response and recovery phases of disaster management. He is particularly interested in applying empirical methods (both qualitative and quantitative) to understand the social-technical complexities that characterise the use of these systems during emergency events. His motivation in research is driven by a working research question: how can we better design systems and harness existing resources to enhance decision making and improve the resilience of people, infrastructure and businesses to both man-made and natural disasters? Robert’s PhD research investigates how the management of hydrological infrastructure assets such as waterways, floodgates, pumps, etc. can be improved through a data-driven approach that relies on non-conventional data sources like crowdsourced social media data, locally-made cheap sensors and graph representations of the hydrological infrastructure network. The research, which was investigated through a combination of quantitative methods like computational and network analysis, contributes significantly to improving decision making and flood control outcomes in data-starved regions, particularly coastal mega-cities in developing nations.