HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – An international tech conference in Honolulu this week aims to prevent communication breakdowns during disasters, like what we saw during the Lahaina wildfires. Delays in getting information out to the public proved disastrous.
Building secure, resilient communication systems is one of the goals of the Indo-Pacific Technology and Climate Change (PaCT) conference kicking off Monday at the Ala Moana Hotel.
“How do we analyze and crunch all of that data in real time for people to make decisions and to communicate with the public?” said Bernice Glenn Kissinger, co-founder of Pacific Impact Zone.
The Pacific International Center for High Technology Research hosts the two-day event. Leaders from the U.S., Japan, Australia, and Pacific Island nations will work on ways to share data quickly and securely.
“This is really a challenge of tyranny of distance where you’ve got incredible dearth of of water areas, we now have really lead marine organization called the littoral regiments, the Marine littoral regiments that are very agile and meant to move across these vast areas with the type of data gathering that we need,” Kissinger said.
Militaries use drones and other technologies to capture data visually and analyze them for security threats — from a missile attack to a natural disaster. And security experts say Hawaii plays a key role.
“Not just for the military where we have all of the services headquartered here for the region. We also have a tremendous amount of resources in natural disaster and National Disaster Preparedness centers, Senator Inouye had ensured that we have some very rich database and computer capabilities, especially on Maui, the Island of Maui and the community there which is highly talented and poised to support it,” Kissinger said.
Also happening this week, the U.S. Department of Defense is hosting an artificial intelligence hackathon at Schofield Barracks to jumpstart coordination between Japan, Australia, the Pacific Islands and other allies.
For more information visit indopact.org.
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