The event, which takes place on 6 July from 10:00-13.30 (Local - Eastern European Time) at the Prefecture of Lesvos, Mytilene in Greece, is chaired by the Prefect of Lesvos and features a talk and pilot demo of the Virtual Fire application, a round-table debate on technologies enabling civil protection and interviews with the press and media.

The application in question is called Virtual Fire. It has been developed in the  context of emergency management aiming to assist on wildfire early warning, control and civil protection, which requires advanced computing applications and intensive computing. The outcomes of the Virtual Fire - Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Platform for Forest Fire Management will feed into a new European project, VENUS-C, (Virtual Multidisciplinary Environments Using Cloud Infrastructures), a new European research and technological project currently under negotiation with the European Commission, which is aimed at bringing, in twenty-four months, new scientific applications to the cloud for the benefit of European incubators and industrial clusters, especially in high value-add Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), small and medium enterprises and small research labs.

“The VENUS Cloud will host models used for predicting forest fire risks based on meteorological and geographical data coupled with fire propagation simulation to understand how the fire is likely to spread based on the actual meteorological data, vegetation and landscape morphology. These prediction data, along with a plethora of other information, spanning roads, location of water tanks, the positioning of aircrafts and vehicles, vegetation types and weather data, will be visualised over on-line maps such as Bing Maps, enabling fire fighters in control centres or on site via hand-held devices to manage forest fires and deal with any other emergencies situations arising more effectively. The Cloud, which will be tested in Venus-C for the demanding computational and visualisation tasks involved in civil protection and emergencies, offers a promising solution for civil protection agencies that do not have the know-how and expertise to operate their own computing and IT systems”, says Professor Kostas  Kalabokidis, University of the Aegean and Principal Investigator of the Virtual Fire initiative.

University of the Aegean - Department of Geography