[MUSIC PLAYING]
CAN COMERTOGLU: Hello, everyone.
I'm John with the Geo Crisis team.
And today I'm going to be talking to you about what's
new in crisis response.
I'll also share a preview of the crisis program coming
up later in the talk, so stay tuned for that,
but let's dive in.
Our agenda is, I'm going to be talking a little bit
about where we are today, what we've
been up to in the last year or so,
and what's next on the roadmap.
So when we say crisis response at Google, what do we mean?
What we mean is really, in times of crises,
people come to Google seeking information about what
is going on, where things are.
And they come to us looking for floods, super storms,
or even unfortunate attacks.
To make this easy for people to learn about things
as they happen, we have a set of products across Search and Geo,
we refer to as crisis alerts.
This really fits well with Google's mission of organizing
the world's information.
Because we try to assemble the most authoritative information
and get the word out through our high reaching products
like Search and Maps.
These alerts can include things like news headlines, help
and information links that we've curated,
and most related to today, rich map visualizations.
So when I say rich map visualizations, what do I mean?
I mean it's those kind of visuals
that you might be seeing when you
search for a tropical storm all the way to the left.
Where it shows you where the eye of the storm
is as well as that cone that tells you
about where the storm will be.
I'm talking about earthquake shake maps
that shows the epicenter and where damage is.
I'm talking about those floods with high and low depth
information, especially in India.
And then I'm talking about those wildfires and their boundaries,
where we're trying to help you visualize where a fire is
and how big it is.
One other thing that we do in Geo that's less about people
coming to us and learning about fires,
but us helping them know if they're
trying to get directions or are navigating through a crisis,
we have a feature called navigation warnings
that lets them know something is not right.
There might be a crisis affecting their route.
And they might want to reroute, or take
an alternative way to get to the place they need to.
Now, that's what today is.
But we've done quite a bit in the last year or so.
And I want to cover what we've done,
have a couple of announcements that
are really hot off the presses.
But before we focus on those, I do
want to cover something we've been doing
for the past year and a half.
And actually, a lot of this is, you might have seen it,
you might have used it.
But it's kind of gone from the product.
We've sunsetted it.
But it's really important for us to tell our story.
And that's the COVID-19 response.
Our team has been working with COVID-19 response
since the very early days of the pandemic.
Our goal has been, how can we make
it easy for people who are using Google Maps to get things done?
How can we make it easy so that they
can have locally relevant, authoritative information
about the pandemic?
And that ended up with this very prominent alert,
all the way on the left.
You can see that there's a little alert banner.
You've probably seen it.
You've probably interacted with that.
In there we had news sources, curated by our news team,
related to COVID.
We've had announcements, which was coming directly
from officials.
And we brought them into the experience
so you can quickly see them.
We've had some nearby resources.
Early on, it was focused on testing.
And then lastly but very importantly,
local and national resources, so you
can find out the official links to official information related
to the area that you're looking at.
In this case, it was Seattle, because this
was a screenshot from my phone.
About six months ago or so, we've
introduced a new layer in Google Maps.
One of the first new layers we've introduced in a while.
And it was focused on the COVID case counts around the world.
One of the things that our team did
is introduce that alert into that layer,
so that if you were looking at different places
and understanding what the conditions were in that place,
you could also get to the locally related
and authoritative information.
Same things that I showed you earlier.
And towards the end of the pandemic,
we had vaccination locations in Google.
Thanks to the work that a lot of our partners
in the organization and outside, we
were able to bring in vaccine locations
across many geographies.
Some examples like Brazil, Canada, Chile, France,
and more.
And what we've done is we brought those into this COVID
sheet so that it only took two taps for people
to discover those COVID vaccination locations, which
was a really helpful feature to be able to launch
during the pandemic.
Now, I just wanted to capture this
because this was a huge focus for our team for the better
part of last year.
But most of this experience is now sunsetted.
It's not part of Google Maps right now,
because we made the rest of the ecosystem really rich.
You can still find vaccination information,
testing centers in Google Maps by just searching for them.
And of course, you can find COVID information
across Google products.
So this alert has served its purpose,
and we've moved on from it.
But the information you need are still in Google in the places
that you're used to looking for information.
So then let's talk about what's new.
So public alerts is a big focus of our team.
And you might ask, what are public alerts?
That's a term that we use a lot, but you might not
know about it.
Public alerts is the way we bring
in authoritative information into Google.
We bring it into Google, in Google Maps and Google Search.
We have the authoritative information showing
information such as floods.
And this year, we've expanded the flood information
to Bangladesh.
It has new mapping visualizations this year.
So when you're looking at a public alert in Google Search,
you're going to see a quick thumbnail in Google Search
so you can understand where that public alert is about.
Also, we've expanded our public alerts
to include 18 new countries.
And finally, and very, very recently,
with partnership with JMA, the Japan Meteorological Agency,
we're able to introduce two new public alert
types, one focused on earthquakes and the last one
on typhoons, as you can see on my screen.
This information is bringing locally relevant visualizations
for typhoon cones so that when a typhoon alert is shown,
our local users in Japan can understand it
in the way they expect to see it.
This information, of course, is augmented
by official info from JMA, as well as
a legend that makes it easy to understand
what different components of that map
is meant for your safety.
So public alerts are our way of bringing a lot of information
from authorities into Google.
But there are two types of crises
that I want to talk about, where we've done really
special new improvements this year.
First one is wildfire mapping.
According to our partners at NIFC,
the National Interagency Fire Center, already in 2021,
there has been over 45,000 wildfires in the US alone.
Burning more than 5.6 million acres,
which is larger than the state of Connecticut.
Wildfires remain a massive concern for people
all around the world.
And what we've done is, last year, we've
started mapping boundaries of these large wildfires.
But you have to see them one at a time.
So what we've done this year is launch a dedicated layer
to wildfires.
Right in the layers tab, you will
be able to see, pull up the layers tab,
turn on the wildfires there, and you're
going to see all wildfires we know about.
Moreover, we have brought in a new partnership
with NIFC, bringing in all active wildfires in the US
into this experience.
So at any time, you can turn on the wildfire tab
and see everything that Google knows about.
You can see the name of the fire, the location,
if it's a large fire.
You can see the boundary.
And if you have that information,
we'll let you know about help and information links
from official sources, news related to these fires,
and if you have the information, we're
going to show you the containment and the size
of the fire as well.
These are the important pieces of information
to help keep you safe.
This layer is already rolling out.
We've announced it at Search On.
If you've tuned into the Search On event, Provocar on stage
announced that we've began rolling this out in September.
And it's rolling out to our users.
And we're going to be continuing that rollout until everyone has
it on Android, iOS, and web.
But what we've learned as we worked on wildfires is,
yes, the fires themselves are really important
to people's safety, to people's homes, and for themselves.
But a second thing is really important for them,
and that's air quality.
You can see on the left chart that people
tend to search for air quality at the same time they're
searching for wildfires.
And when we asked our users what information we can help you
with next during wildfires, of course
they wanted to know what the damage from the fire was,
where the fire is, where it's headed.
But the number one response was the air quality
due to wildfires.
So to think about air quality, and what we could do about it,
we started looking into it and learned
that it is one of the main concerns
for air pollution becomes a main driver of that
across the globe.
9 out of 10 people breathe air containing
high level of pollutants.
And as I said earlier, the user need of wildfires
is literally the top one.
So we've learned through our research
that increased awareness of air quality
is one of the first things we need to go do.
We need to improve our ability to let
people know about air quality.
So for that in Geo, we're working on a new layer
dedicated to air quality.
We've announced this a few months ago
in a blog post, that some of you might remember.
But this is the first time I want
to show you the latest on it.
So this layer, just like the wildfires there
I showed you earlier, will be part of the Google Maps
experience that you use today.
It's going to be a dedicated layer, starting
with information from EPA's air announcement stations.
There are PurpleAir sensors that people can buy and put
in their own homes to help their neighborhood learn
about local air quality.
CPCB sensors in India, as well as censors
from the State of Victoria in Australia.
We're going to start with those.
We're going to be bringing in locally appropriate
official index values, so that if you already
know the indices that you use for your local area,
we're going to be showing you those numbers
so you don't have to learn something new.
We're going to make it very easy for you to see where we're
getting our information, so you can
verify that's the information that you wanted to get.
We're going to provide nearby stations.
Because what we learned is, it's usually
not just one station people want to know about the air quality
from.
They want to get a sense of the general area, which
really we're trying to help with our nearby air quality
features.
And lastly, there are areas, especially
with PurpleAir and EPA, there are some areas
with many, many stations.
So we're introducing these concepts of Tinies.
You can see those little dots on the map.
Those Tinies are really, really useful to get
a sense of what the area is doing,
to get a sense of different stations,
to make sure that you really understand what the area's air
quality is before you're there.
So I've covered what we've been up to with COVID-19 response,
our new wildfires layer.
Some work that we're doing in floods in Bangladesh
as well as the typhoons and earthquakes in Japan.
And then I showed you a sneak peak of the air quality layer
that we're working on and we've announced earlier in the year.
So now I want to talk just a little bit
about what's next for us, what we're looking at.
These are not commitments that I'm
making that we're going to be doing all of these.
Instead, I just want to show you how
the team is thinking about what we're going to be doing next.
And it's really these three things, new verticals,
expanding coverage, and supporting different parts
of the crisis lifecycle.
What do we mean when we say new verticals?
As I said, we are trying to bring more crisis
types, that rich information about more crisis types
into Google all the time.
The two that we're hearing from our users
are tsunamis, especially when they happen around earthquakes.
That information we need, according to our users.
And so are smoke maps.
So air quality, wildfires, those are good.
How about smoke, is a question that we get from our users.
But if you have others, if you have
ideas that we should be looking into other types of crises,
please let us know.
We need your feedback to focus our energies to get better
at these new verticals.
Then, as I said earlier, these disasters,
these crises are increasing.
But they're also increasing globally.
So we don't have the luxury of saying,
hey, we have one crisis type in this one country,
we're good to go.
No, we have to be thinking about increasing that coverage.
So we are looking into that.
Of course, it means we need to have
local partnerships, satellite data, and other kinds of data.
So it's not an easy thing, but it's an important thing,
and we're looking into it.
So we're thinking about floods and wildfires
as they increase around the globe.
How can we bring that information
to the rest of the places, not just US, Australia,
or those places that we have currently.
And then lastly but very importantly,
our focus to date has really been
about alerting and informing.
That's what Google does for a lot of things, including
crisis.
But we know that there are other parts of crises, right?
Evacuations is a big, important aspect of crisis.
So after they happen, how can we help people,
using Google Maps to navigate, how can we
make that easier during navigation
better using Google Maps?
We also are looking at things like early alerting
and predictions.
Can we help people before a crisis happens?
You might have heard about some of our investments
in earthquake early alerting.
We want to keep looking into that type of activation.
And then things like fresh imagery after a crisis,
to show what the new reality is on the ground using
satellite imagery and other aerial imagery.
That's very interesting for us to be looking at as well.
But if you have thoughts or feedback
about any one of these, please reach out.
We have sessions in which we would
love to hear from you on what type of experiences
we should be looking at, what you think
we need to be investing in.
And with that, I want to leave you
with a little bit about what's next in the summit.
I'm very excited.
This is my first time in the Geo for Good Summit as a speaker.
And I hope you learned something and enjoyed the talk.
But there are many, many other parts
of the program that I would really
encourage you to look at.
We have keynotes and demos from Brandon Williams,
who is with the Eagle County emergency operations
team in Colorado.
And we have two Googlers, Christophe and Christian,
who will be talking about animating Fire datasets using
Earth Engine.
After that, we'll hand it over to several of our partners
to talk you through a variety of ways geospatial technologies
can help in your crisis work.
Everything from mapping with 3D imagery and open data,
to using maps for wildfire detection and management.
Finally, we'll end the day with an informal meet and greet.
We hope you can join us and introduce yourself and learn
about what other members of the Geo for Good community
are working on in the crisis space.
Look for details on how to join that on the summit website.
And if you can't join us Thursday, no problem.
We'll have all the talks recorded and posted
to the summit website after the event.
So with that, thank you so much for joining me.
And I hope you have a great rest of your summit.
Thank you very much.
[MUSIC PLAYING]