UC professor helps UN maintain Web site

A University of Cincinnati professor assisted U.N. relief in Haiti by helping establish servers that allow the exchange of satellite data with Port-au-Prince.

Richard Beck, an assistant professor of geography, spearheaded the UC portion of the project, which was part of the “United Nations Platform for Space-based Information for Disaster Management and Emergency Response,” system, or UN-SPIDER.

Beck is humble about his participation.

“There were no other faculty involved, and the U.N. people did most of the work,” Beck said.

Beck originally became involved with the U.N. through a different effort to set up state and national satellite image data networks.

The information from the satellite images can be used to create maps assessing the earthquake damage. The coordination, monitoring and accountability of the large amount of disaster relief currently being provided to the country can also be tracked through the system.

The genesis of the project began three years ago. The U.N. utilized the servers at UC
during that time until it was able to transfer the project to its facility in Bonn, Germany.

Lóránt Czárán, head of the U.N. office in Bonn, praised Beck and UC for work on the project.

“We were struggling with the procedures to purchase and make available our own servers,” Czárán said. “The server hosting that Professor Beck provided for our knowledge portal in its beta release allowed us to operate it many months earlier than we could have from Bonn.”

UC also was able to provide fast Internet service as a result of its infrastructure,
Czárán said.

“I believe as we used UC resources, with the kind and generous mediation from professor Beck there, ultimately that infrastructure helped us better establish our Web presence in building up this new U.N. program,” Czárán said.

Now that the UN-SPIDER project is in Germany, Beck has moved on to another project.

“I made sure that things were working for them for the first week and a half until they could transfer the server to U.N. Bonn,” Beck said. “Then I left for Norway to work on some climate change monitoring network ideas.”