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This is a publication from theYRS2023 - 11th Young Researchers Seminar,held from 15 to 17 May 2023 in Lisbon, Portugal, hosted by the Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil – LNEC (National Laboratory for Civil Engineering). (restricted publication)

Citizen reports and social media images that capture the aftermath of natural disasters contain important information for emergency responders. Currently, these data sources are not fully integrated into existing systems or require labour-intensive user input, which can be challenging in critical situations. In this paper, we apply computer vision services to publicly available imagery to derive meaningful information, extract objects and create text descriptions. This research builds on our previous work and enhances available hazard maps with (near) real-time weather and traffic information. Through this geospatial-based workflow, we aim to reduce climate hazard reporting friction and support operational response to incidents.

The last few years have seen the emergence of many new technologies that can potentially have major impacts on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). One of these technologies is a micro-electromechanical device called smartdust. A smartdust device (or a mote) is typically composed of a processing unit, some memory, and a radio chip, which allows it to communicate wirelessly with other motes within range. These motes can also be augmented with additional sensors – such as those for detecting light, temperature and acceleration – hence enhancing their features and making their application areas virtually limitless.\ud As the smartdust concept is still relatively new, and very little is known about its application in transport domain, conducting research in this area may prove to be very valuable. It is generally perceived that smartdust will become the low-cost, ubiquitous sensor of the future, especially once its size shrinks dramatically to merit its name.\ud Our involvement in several transport-related EU and UK funded projects (ASTRA, 2005; ASK-IT, 2007; EMMA, 2007; Foot-LITE, 2007; MESSAGE, 2007; TRACKSS, 2007) provides us with an opportunity to carry out experiments and to develop demonstrations of smartdust applications in transport systems. We also have a chance to investigate how smartdust can be used in collaboration with other (more traditional) transport sensors for developing better Co-operative Transport Systems (CTS).\ud This paper outlines our experience in these projects and provides an illustration on the important role that the smartdust technology can play in future ITS. We also present encouraging results obtained from our experiments in investigating the feasibility of utilising smartdust in real ITS applications.