Ogie, Robert Dr.

Dr Ogie has an educational background in Engineering, Information Technology (IT) and Information Systems (IS). IT has a crucial role in helping humans adapt to climate change impacts and extreme weather events such as floods and bushfires. Dr Ogie’s core field of research is collaborative and social computing, where he focuses on designing or harnessing human-centred technologies such as social media, crowdsourcing tools, mobile applications, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies to improve resilience and support decision making for citizens and emergency agencies during the prevention, preparation, response, and recovery phases of the disaster management cycle. 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 in times of crisis. Dr Ogie was a key investigator for the PetaJakarta.org project, which explored crowdsourced Twitter data for real-time flood mapping in the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. He led the #RecoverSouthCoast project to investigate the role of social media in supporting recovery from the Black Summer bushfires in the Australian South Coast. Dr Ogie is a recipient of the Illawarra Multicultural Awards 2020, with his project, EmerCALD, winning the Community Innovation Award for working with 450 community members across seven language groups, local organisations, and the State Emergency Service (SES) to improve emergency communication with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities during natural disasters.