2 years since Earth Quake in Japan

2 years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake, but it will still take years to recover from the earth quake, tsunami and nuclear power plant accident in Japan back in 2011. It is important for us to remember and keep supporting the victims.

Cleaning of the debris from tsunami has finally passed 50%

Ministry of Environment in Japan announced that among the 3 prefectures (Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima) that were hit by the tsunami, cleaning of the debris has finally passed 50%. (3,660,000 ton in Iwate, 11,030,000 ton in Miyagi and 1,610,000 ton in Fukushima, total 16,300,000 ton).

NHK: 震災がれき処理 ようやく半分終わる[ja]

This is Onagawa, back in April, 2012. We were literally driving in between the pile of debris on both sides of the road.

59% of the survey respondents replied reconstruction is not progressing

NHK (National TV station in Japan) created an infographic based on a survey with 1,000 citizens. They have English version as well.

Infographic "The Great East Japan Earthquake: Two Years Later"
Detailed survey result [ja]

Despite massive government funding, 59% replied  reconstruction is not progressing, and many people are still unable to return to their hometowns.

Fear that the earthquake and/or they will be forgotten

I have heard from many people in the area that their biggest fear is to be forgotten. Most of the Japanese people are back to their lives before the earthquake, and beginning to forget about the crisis in Tohoku. Mainstream media's coverage on Tohoku has decreased. We need to remember, and keep supporting them.

According to a survey conducted by Kahoku Shinpo newspaper, 54.5% of the respondents replied they are afraid that the earthquake will be forgotten.

2013.03.13 石巻地方仮設住民にアンケート本社・河北新報社 震災の風化に不安[ja]

Memories for the Future

At the “Memories for the Future” website, you can see the photos, videos and Google Streetview images of Tohoku. Memories from before the quake is important since many of the photos were lost by tsunami. Memories from after the quake is painful but important so that we remember what happened and prepare for the future crisis. You can also see 360-degree panoramic imagery inside the buildings that were hit by the tsunami.

Memories for the Future website

Outside view

View Larger Map

Inside buildings


大きな地図で見る
These are places that are able to visit and see with your own eyes. On the other hand, there are places you can't go.

Hangout among Fukushima's citizens in diaspora to connect

The citizens who were living near the Fukushima nuclear power plant are still prohibited to go back to their hometown due to radiation, and their citizens are in a diaspora to different places. Their community is torn down.

Can technology solve the problem? The answer is no, but it sure can help. The citizens of Futaba-cho are holding meetings called "Meeting for the recovery with 7,000 citizens (7000人の復興会議[ja])", and they used Google+ Hangouts to connect different cities that the citizens are in diaspora, via network.

7000人会議ネットでつながり、議論に熱が上がります(^-^)v twitter.com/Fkafe_juju/sta…
— F カフェ　珠寿 (@Fkafe_juju) December 10, 2012

Street view of Fukushima's exclusion zones

21,000 citizens of Namie City are also in diaspora to 30 different places, and unable to see their hometown. "After the earthquake, the world is moving towards the future. Japan is moving toward recovery. But our town Namie-cho has stopped even after 2 year have passed due to the radiation. Please see the current reality of the town. It is the responsibility of current generations to pass on our learnings, history and culture to the future generations." Says Mr. Baba,  mayor of Namie.

In order to help keep the memory, document the current reality, and make it visible to those in the world who cannot actually visit Japan, Google Japan went to shoot Google Street View inside the area that is forbidden by the government to live.

Recovery Hangout on Air

When I visited Tohoku, I met someone who was getting a TV station crew documenting him for 2 days, but all of the things he wanted to broadcast was deleted by the TV crew, and the only thing that made it on the TV show was what the director asked him to say. This is not right. Internet is an excellent tool for people to get their voice heard. So we started a project called Fukko Hangout (Fukko means recovery), and tried to make it a tool for the victims to broadcast what they want others to know, with their own voice.

So the first Fukko Hangout we did was with local crisis radio stations. After the quake, power went down, and roads wer not drivable, so TV didn't work, newspapers were not delivered, radio was one of the best solutions to gather information for the victims.

People who were launching and running those radio stations faced lots of difficulties, and we thought such information should be shared so that we can prepare for the future disasters.




At the second Fukko Hangout, we focused on the city of Kesennuma. Because the city was hit by tsunami, shops in the shopping area were washed away, and temporary shopping area was rebuilt. However after interviewing several business owners there, they were facing various difficulties. TV stations would come and say this is great there are shops and the city is recovering, but those temporary shops are far from temporary houses that the victims are relocated, so only the tourist would come. Temporary houses are in the mountain side, temporary shops are in the ocean side. Also, current shops are "temporary" and there are limits to until when they can stay there and keep their operation. We had multiple business owners from multiple temporary shopping areas (there are 8 temporary shopping areas in Kesennuma) as guest speakers to discuss the issues.





After those several sessions, we realized that for some people, speaking in front of the camera and get them livestreamed is not as easy as we thought. Writing text, posting photos are much easier for them. So currently we are focusing on this Google+ channel to get live voices from the people to be heard.

Fukko Hangout Google+[ja]

Businesses decreasing in Tohoku, 72.5% decrease in Otsuchi

According to the census conducted by METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) and MIC (Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications) in 2012, many cities and towns in the coastal area of Tohoku went out of business, and in Otsuchi 72.5%, Minami Sanriku 69.0%, Onagawa 68.1% of the businesses decreased compared to the census in 2009.

Nikkei newspaper: 東北３県、津波被災地で事業所減る 大槌町は72.5％減[ja]
My blog post in Japanese on this matter: 経済センサス「東日本大震災の被災地で事業所減る」[ja]

Rebuilding the economy - Get Businesses Online

Local businesses in Tohoku were not very tech savvy, but since many of the stores were washed away by tsunami, they needed to rebuild their business, and technology companies started to help. Online became their new sales channel, and gradually expanding their reach.

Yahoo! Japan created an office in Ishinomaki, and started a website called "Yahoo Recovery Department Store [ja]" where you can purchase items from Tohoku.

Google Japan is also doing a project called "Get Business Online[ja]", teaching small business owners how to create websites and e-commerce sites.

One example that I like is the case of Kamaishi. First of all, local highschool students learned how to create websites. Then next, those students taught local business owners how to create websites. I think this is can be a sustainable model.

Iwate Nippo newspaper: "Highschool students teaches how to create websites in Kamaishi 高校生が指南、ウェブサイト作成 釜石で講習会[ja]


Rebuilding the economy for 10 years future- Learning how to code

When I visited Tohoku, several people asked me to start a "Google Dojo" to teach technology. I sat on it for a while.

In Tohoku, main industry was agriculture and fishery. However soil is damaged by sea water from tsunami, and agriculture industry is greatly damaged. Fishery was difficult since many of the ships were wrecked, and radiation in the sea water was a problem. Also, factories were washed away by tsunami, so those industries were damaged as well. They apparently needed a new industry to recover the economy, and IT seemed to be a good option. Although- we can't make non-tech savvy old people to learn how to code, so we decided to work with the younger generation, and start a tech dojo.

https://sites.google.com/site/tohokudojo/

I didn't want to make it a school, because if it is a school, people who comes will just sit there and listen. They expect "teachers to teach them". What we wanted to realize was to make an infrastructure where only those who really wants to learn to code will come voluntarily, teach each other, not just sit during dojo but code during dojo, code after going home, and come back to the next dojo aggressively with lots of questions.

We hosted 2 dojo per month in a physical space, sending tutors from Tokyo to Tohoku physically. Also, we hosted 2 online dojo using Hangout on Air twice a week, so that those who were stuck with questions can ask experts online, share screens and look into the issues, solve them and move forward.

We started our first dojo in November 2012- December 2012 with Sendai, Ishinomaki and Takizawa venues, the second dojo was in February 2013- March 2013 with Ishinomaki and Takizawa venues, and the third dojo will be held on April 2013- June 2013 with Sendai, Ishinomaki, Takizawa, Kitakami and Kanazawa.

Many of the dojo participants are highschool students, but we have housewives, designers, and even junior highschool students.

Preparing for the next disaster - preparing data sets

During the earthquake in 2011, many local governments, tech companies and citizens were scrambling to gather data, provide data, find data, and it was a chaos. Learning from that experience, many Japanese local governments and data holders (infrastructure companies) are starting to partner with tech companies so that when the next disaster happens, they will be prepared to provide data to the citizens involved.

For example, Google partnered with 7 local governments in Japan so that they can provide various data in case of natural disasters- safety information, evacuation center and evacuation routes, hazard maps, etc, and Google will map those data on Google maps and provide to the citizens.

[demo based on evacuation center data provided by Kawasaki City]

Also, NTT Docomo, KDDI, Softbank Mobile (mobile carriers in Japan) are providing their mobile signal recovery data- whether you have mobile signal or not is extremely important in securing communication during crisis. Tokyo Gas is providing gas lifeline data. Gas is important to secure heat and cooking. Honda will be providing car traffic information data based on their GPS on automobiles- during the 2011 crisis, coastal areas were hit by tsunami and it was hard to know which roads are drivable. Honda's data helped to figure out where they should go with their cars. FirstMedia and WeatherNews will be providing their evacuation center data and citizen reports on disasters.

[demo based on Honda's data from 2011/3/16]

Preparing for the next disaster - learn from data

After 1.5 years have passed since the earthquake, we launched a project called "Project311- The Great East Japan Earthquake Big Data Workshop" to gather researchers and developers to revisit and analyze various data from the quake, to get a clue of what can be done to prepare for future disasters.

Data provided includes Asahi Shimbun newspaper articles, Google Insights for Search, text summary of television broadcasts made just after the Great East Japan Earthquake, tweets from the week after March 11, transcripts of the audio broadcasted by NHK in the 24 hours following the disaster and a ranking of frequently used words, Honda Internavi traveled roads data, Rescuenow's railroad operation information and various disaster-related information, traffic congestion statistics from cell phone data, etc.



If you are interested in this project, I started writing blog post about them separately so please check it out.

Project311- About the Data

The bottom line is, there still a long way to go till recovery, but we're doing a lot, making a lot of efforts to help for the recovery of Japan, and it's important that we keep doing it.


Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki

Urban Data Challenge

Last weekend I went to join Urban Data Challenge Awarding Ceremony.

== What is Urban Data Challenge? ==

Their website:
http://urbanprototyping.org/prototype/challenges/urban-data-challenge-zurich-sf-geneva

"Buses, trams, bicycles, pedestrians, and cars zoom about modern cities like blood pulsing through the body. But with urban growth comes challenges—one of them is how to improve transportation. Luckily, advances in technology combined with active open data and open source movements mean the citizenry can increasingly become part of the solution. Unclog the arteries, stimulate circulation.  

The Urban Data Challenge seeks to harvest the innovative and creative power of communities around the world to explore urban data sets through visualization. Designers, programmers, data scientists, and artists alike are invited to take up the challenge: merge and compare mobility data sets from three cities—San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich—and draw meaningful insights.  

Winning projects will showcase the power of open governmental data and facilitate the knowledge exchange between cities. Juried prizes include round-trip airfare to one of the participating cities and funding from Fusepool, the European / Swiss Datapool, for developing the project into an app."

== What makes Urban Data Challenge special? ==

As many of you may know, February 6th was Global Open Data Day, and International Open Data Hackathons were happening all over the world. What makes Urban Data Challenge special and what can we learn from them?

http://opendataday.org/

1) Longer period of time

Whereas most events in the world were one day hackathons, the Urban Data Challenge ran from February 6th through March 31, 2013 so the developers had plenty of time to work on their projects and get it finished.

2) International

Most events were standalone events in their own cities, but the Urban Data Challenge was a collaboration of 3 cities- San Francisco, Geneva and Zurich. Also, the developers joined from various places such as Singapore and Paris.

3) Focus

They were very focused on transportation data, and visualization.

4) Cooperation with the cities

Hoping that the developers will make awesome visualizations, the 3 cities provided actual data they can work with. This example gave the cities to understand the value of open data and the wonderful things that they can expect on the citizens.

5) Collaboration with the 3 cities

Since the 3 cities provided data of public transits in a similar way, developers were able to make one application and compare the data and visualization between different cities.

6) Prizes

They had lots of prizes as well, including 2 round trip tickets for 2 people to one of the participating cities: Zurich, San Francisco or Geneva, cash prize, and international exhibition recommendation.


== Winners ==

Grand Prize Dots on the Bus

Demo: San Francisco 
Demo: Zurich 
Demo: Geneva

"Sometimes riding transit can seem intimidating, but this visualization proves it: everybody’s doing it. Pick a route off the map and watch a day in the life of the line. Buses speed by, passengers jumping on and off. Some lines are slow, some are hopping, and rush hour is often hilarious."

Second Prize 1) Transit Quality + Equity

Demo: San Francisco
Demo: Zurich
Demo: Geneva

"Transit performance is often solely measured by speed and efficiency. But how well do transit systems actually serve the diverse populations in a city? Do people of different economic classes experience different quality of service and access? By overlaying transit data with income levels, these maps visualize the equity impacts of transit service."

Second Prize 2) Frustration Index

Demo: San Francisco / Zurich / Geneva

"Frustration Index shows the Level of Service (or Frustration) for transit services in San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich. Our web application visualizes frustration factors (capacity or crowdedness, delay, and speed) for one day in October 2012 across the three cities. "

Third Prize 1) A City’s Heartbeat

Demo: Geneva

"A City’s Heartbeat is a web-based interactive visualization using Geneva’s transportation dataset. This project has three main features.

Firstly, we transformed the transportation dataset into a data cube format, which allows us to render big, time series data in the client. A playback of tram movements over a 2 day period allows us to “feel the pulse” of the city."

"Feature two aims to visualize the volume of passengers over time. By using CSS 3, we utilised 2½ dimension to illustrate the passenger volume in each tram station. A complimentary D3.js line graph plots the overall passenger volume for the entire city. This visualization is our interpretation of the city’s “blood pressure”."

"In the third feature, we bring users into the 3rd Dimension by taking them on a tour of the real Geneva city’s tram routes. Users will experience the journey through a realistic 3D environment, and be able to see what is around the tram route. We believe this visualization adds additional meaning and context to the previous two parts."

Third Prize 2) TransitVis 

iPad app on app store
Sourcecode on github
Blog post

"TransitVis is an iPad app that lets users examine transit ridership data from public agencies. Given a properly formatted data set, a user can see various statistics over a selected time period. Users can tap on individual stops to drill down into the data or zoom out to see overall trends. The app provides a map layer underneath the data and the ability to move around in 3D to see how things relate to each other."

Demo video for those who don't have iPad ;)

Third Prize 3) Urban Bus Races

Demo: San Francisco / Zurich / Geneva

"Powered by transit data from San Francisco, Zurich and Geneva, Urban Bus Races is an interactive tool that allows users to visualize, measure, and compare bus route performance using actual transit data. Urban Bus Races indicates the location of buses operating on the routes selected, during the date and hour selected (local time). The size of the grey circles along the routes represent the number of passengers waiting at the stop. When a bus, represented by a small white circle, arrives at a stop, all waiting passengers board the bus and the grey circle shrinks to show that the passenger queue has been served. This allows users to quickly visualize areas of the city where large queues are forming, by time of day. Large queues may be an indication that reliability needs to be improved to reduce gaps between buses or that service frequencies need to be increased to satisfy demand. The background maps are color-graduated according to the corresponding Walk Score®, to highlight areas of the city with more accessible destinations within walking distance of a transit stop."

Honorable Mentions
Breakpoints / Buzz Stop / MetroMapperSF / One Map, One Week in Public Transit / Reliable + Pleasant Transit / Transit Patterns / Urban Data Response


== Highlight videos ==

Highlights from the Hack Day:



It was great that Chris Pangilinan from SFMTA (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency) actually came to the hackathon and watched the developers work on their data onsite, he did the judge, and came to the award ceremony to do a panel with his counterparts in Zurich and Geneva.

You can watch the interview video with Chris here:

Also, it looks like they hosted a workshop on D3.js.

"D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation. "

Video of D3.js workshop can be seen here.


== Open Data ==

San Francisco
Zurich
Geneva

== Photos from the Awarding Ceremony ==











One of the prizes was international exhibition recommendation :)



They connected with Zurich, Geneva, Paris and Singapore- participants overseas stayed up despite the time difference.









They had city transportation officials from City of San Francisco, Zurich and Geneva to do a panel discussion.



They actually didn't do the demo on stage, so those who wanted to see the actual sites stayed later to play with the demos after the ceremony





Lots of food and mimosa for brunch






== Inspiration ==

Urban Data Challenge took inspiration from Ville Vivante, a beautiful visualization of citizen mobility through cellular data, which was a collaboration between the City of Geneva, Lift Conference, and Interactive Things in 2012.


Ville Vivante Trailer from Interactive Things on Vimeo.

4/19 Update:
The event was co-organized/hosted by swissnex San Francisco :)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki

Hack4Good hackathon

I joined "Hack4Good" hackathon this weekend.

It is a bit different from regular hackathons in that the participants (hackers) are basically current Googlers or ex-Googlers that want to help those who needs help. Also, unlike regular hackathons that participants come up with an idea and hack, we had non-profits that has specific issues that they want help with. I think it was a great opportunity to match people who needs technical help and those who have skills to help. And in general Googlers and ex-Googlers have the spirit of wanting to change the world for the good, organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, and really good at it, so I think it was great that they organized this event!

The 4 Non-profits were Charity Water, D-Rev, MapLight and Hackidemia.

Day 1 started with presentations from Google Developer Relations team on the newest Google technologies and tools that the teams can use, then Alex from Code for America who kindly provided their office as hackathon venue gave a short speech, then the non-profits gave their pitches on what they do, and what they'd like help with. Then the participants started wandering the room asking questions about the non-profits... about the data they already have, the platform they already use, what look and feel they want out of the new app/site we are creating, and figured out what project they might be able to help with, and started to form the teams.

== Charity: Water == 

Charity: Water is a non-profit that brings clean, drinking water to those in need. They have raised $93M over the past 6 years, funded 8,232 water projects in 20 countries and served clean, drinking water to over 3.2 million people. 

For this Hack4Good hackathon, they were asking to help visualize the water project portfolio that they have and also overlay/present any relevant news or data on those maps.

They sent their tech team here so that they can work together.



Message video:

== D-Rev ==

D-Rev is a non-profit product design company that designs and delivers products for people living on less than $4 per day.





They are about to launch the next version of their ReMotion Knee - a highly affordable, world-class knee prosthetic.



At this hackathon, they would like help in designing an integrated data collection and evaluation app for Android that will track their patients from their first fitting through their follow-up visits.



Message video:

== MapLight ==

MapLight is a nonpartisan research organization that reveals money's influence on politics.





They have recently launched the most up-to-date, comprehensive federal campaign finance data set currently available for free, public use.





However, due to its enormous data size, the CSV format in which they currently provide the data makes it difficult for users to do more than scratch the surface of this data set without the assistance of MapLight researchers. Hence, they receive data requests from journalists and nonprofits every day, they manually run queries and deliver results. They wanted help in building a simple search interface allowing users to directly query our database and download their filtered results... an important step to make our government more transparent and accountable to us all.



Message video:

== HacKIDemia ==

Hackidemia is a mobile invention lab where kids can learn science, new tech, and art by doing and by playing. They design and facilitate hands-on workshops and train local team of mentors to go to public schools and do these workshops.

Video of Hackidemia in Nigeria:



Making a circuit to convert DC to AC.



A boy extracting DNA of strawberry.



It's open source knowledge to physical making :D

So far they used a Google site for sharing all of the resources with the mentors, parents and teachers, but because the number of mentors is increasing a lot, they want to develop something more scalable. A web app where makers, parents and teachers can update each others instructions and order parts easily.

The Hackidemia web will provide a layer of meaning and action for the vast world of maker projects found across the internet. The app does this in the following ways:
• Users can save projects to their personal lab to share, revisit, and remix later.
• Users can buy the required materials for any online project directly through HacKIDemia's web app. This is possible through their network of materials providers, and an interface that makes building user's shopping list and ordering as easy and copy, paste, click.
• The app connects makers and educators with related content, activities, and curriculum from across the web. This is possible through a partnership with open education platforms like Khan Academy and Gooru.

Message video:

== Opening ==

Laura Gramann, the organizer of Hack4Good opening the hackathon.



Alex from Code for America welcoming the participants.

== Demos ==

We've had our colleagues from Developer Relations team- Wolff Dobson and Paul Saxman give presentations about some of the newest Google technologies and tools that they can use.

== Photos from hackathon ==

== Venue ==

Code for America kindly allowed us to use their office on Friday night and throughout the Saturday.

== Swags ==

Hack4Good T-shirts- Where there is Google event... there is a Google T-shirt... ;)





Raffle event many times, with a mobile battery present.

Hack4Good customized M&M's

== Food ==

== Judging Criteria ==

They had the following 5 judging criteria:

Impact: How much impact (scale and quality) could the solution have?
Complexity: Does the proposed solution have many moving parts (figuratively or physically)?
Sustainability: How well is the proposed plan prepared for implementation?
Creativity: Does use existing technology in a new way? Was the solution crated from scratch? Is its approach unique?
Presentation: How well did the team communicate their idea? How well did they respond to questions from judges?

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer. -Fumi Yamazaki