Abstract

Title: Disasters or Disaster Management in the age of Ambient Location


With the widespread adoption of smartphones and their associated capabilities globally we are now living in a time where access to our location and information about our surroundings is always available. This new environment offers both the individual unprecedented access to relevant information, but also crucially potentially offers authorities and emergency teams information about the location of populations in affected areas, their movements and impact on infrastructures.

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CV
Ed Parsons is the Geospatial Technologist of Google, with responsibility for evangelising Google’s mission to organise the world’s information using geography. In this role he maintains links with Governments, Universities, Research and Standards Organisations which are involved in the development of Geospatial Technology.

Ed was the first Chief Technology Officer in the 200-year-old history of Ordnance Survey, and was instrumental in moving the focus of the organisation from mapping to Geographical Information. He came to the Ordnance Survey from Autodesk, where he was EMEA Applications Manager for the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Division.

He earned a Masters degree in Applied Remote Sensing from Cranfield Institute of Technology, holds a Honorary Doctorate in Science from Kingston University, London and is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium and was co-chair of the W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web Working Group. He is a Visiting Professor at University College London and an Executive Fellow at the University of Aberdeen Business School. Ed is married with two children and lives in South West London.