15th Annual Capabilities Demo, October 18th-20th, 2021

The 15th Annual STAR-TIDES Tech Demo will be held Oct 19-20, 2021 (T-W) at George Mason University’s Fairfax campus. Mon, Oct 18 will be a set-up day so people don’t have to travel on the weekend. The TIDES tech demo at the Pentagon is Oct 21-22. The TouchNet sign up link will be posted shortly. 

This year’s event will be special. Combining the success of last year’s virtual event, with over 26 hours of video on our YouTube site, and the traditional open field format, this will be a “Phygital” (physical + digital) event.  The details are being worked out, but we expect a significant online presence on the 18th, followed by other events on the 19th and 20th to complement the online presence. 

The overall theme will be “Building Sustainable Resilience in a Post-COVID World,” but exhibitors will be welcome in areas such as power, shelter, water, food and agriculture, information & communications technology, nutrition & public health, transport & logistics, geospatial information systems, etc.. As before, STAR-TIDES will be hosted by George Mason’s transdisciplinary Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities (C-RASC). C-RASC’s broad scope and reach allows resilience questions to be addressed from both technical and policy points of view.  

Meetings and Webinars Tentative Schedule 2021

Feb		210205		Narrative & Storytelling — Sara Cobb <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfiewme4h0I>
Feb		210210	Coordinate with WWHGD: Mapping Education              (10:00-12:00)
Mar		24		Energy & Energy Storage (Amb Rich Kauzlarich, mod ): Clean Energy: Low Income Populations and Environmental Justice <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orBmv3TdvP4>
Apr		9		Connecting science policy and implementation from Sustainability to Resilience. Agora process (Elira Karaja)
Apr		mid		Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, or STAR-TIDES overview
Apr		late		ICT: Engineering underpinnings of community resilience: Cyber-Physical Systems
May		early		Education & Training or Water, Sanitation & Hygiene
May		mid		Closing the Digital Divide or Agriculture & Food Security
May		late		Ethics (John Francis), or Finance, FinTech, InsureTech,
Jun		early		Shelter, Heating/Cooling, Lighting
Jun		mid		Transport & Logistics
Jun		late		Puerto Rico Reconstruction
Jul		mid		Health, Nutrition, Integrated Cooking
Jul		late		Career Track
Aug		early		Coordinated, Synchronized, Integrated, Approaches
Aug		mid		Metrics or Identity Management
Sep		mid		Precursor of 2021 Capabilities Demo (1)
Sep		late		Precursor of 2021 Capabilities Demo (2)

Events

Since its founding in 2007 STAR-TIDES has been involved in a wide array of real-world events, technology demonstrations, field experiments, and focused projects, sometimes involving teams of network members. Some of the relief efforts STAR-TIDES has supported include Cyclones Sidr in Bangladesh (2007), Nargis in Myanmar (2008), and Pam in Vanuatu (2015); the 2010 Haiti earthquake; the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (aka Fukushima); Hurricanes Sandy in 2012, and Irma/Maria in 2017; Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda in the Philippines (2013), and the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, as well as aid to a damaged medical clinic in South Sudan in 2012/13. Technology demonstrations have been held every year, first at National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, DC, and now at George Mason University (GMU) in northern Virginia. STAR-TIDES has participated in conferences and exhibits from California to Dubai, and in field experimentation, largely at Camp Roberts in central California. STAR-TIDES members also helped manage an award-winning technology demonstration on expeditionary water power and communications.

Network members have investigated civil-military engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as improving distributed, renewable energy infrastructures.  A “STAR-TIDES Japan” network supports a Japanese Cabinet Office project on Public, Environmental Health, and Disaster Medicine and other international STAR-TIDES networks are under discussion.

From the teams perspective, in 2015 over 80 network members responded in a week to a foreign government request for support to refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, and other members supported 2018 CAPSTONE project by GMU students on community revitalization in West Virginia with information about innovative shelters.  In the last three months network members have formed a team to enhance rural broadband connectivity, for example in Native American communities and other distributed populations. 

Tech Demos and Field Experiments

Projects

Teams