On October 13, the Resilience Research and Education Promotion Consortium (R2EC) held the 4th Symposium “Toward the Realization of a Resilient Society with New Normal -Reflections brought about by the COVID-19-“.

The number of participants reached more than 150 people from universities, research institutes, companies, and government offices, including some overseas organizations. The symposium was supported by 20 academic societies, associations, councils, and newspapers.

In the first part, Prof. Shinya Kuno, a chair of the Master’s and Doctoral Programs in Sport and Wellness Promotion at the Univ. of Tsukuba, Mr. Atsuhiro Tanaka of NEC Secure Systems Res. Labs., and Prof. Yuichiro Usuda of National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED) gave lectures on the insights brought by COVID-19 from the fields of health, ICT, and disaster prevention.

In his lecture titled “The interaction between health literacy, governmental policy, public opinion, and people behavior under the COVID-19 pandemic,” Prof. Kuno reported the situation of reduced exercise habits and decreased cognitive functions brought about by self-restraint and stay-home, and shared measures to improve these conditions and the three literacies necessary for COVID-19 prevention (health literacy, information identification literacy, and ICT literacy of the elderly).

In his presentation titled “The Future Image of Information Infrastructure for a Society and Its Application to Smart Cities through COVID-19 disease,” Mr. Tanaka introduced the progress of information and communication systems such as the data platform “Urban OS,” which is an important infrastructure for realizing smart cities, and then summarized the realization of resilience from the aspect of information service provision.

Prof. Usuda’s presentation was titled “Digital Technology for Disaster Resilience with New Normal”, and he shared the idea that the “New Normal” can be understood as “Build Back Better” in the context of disaster prevention and resilience, and that it is something that the disaster prevention field has been working on for a long time. He then introduced two digital disaster prevention technologies for immediate information sharing among different entities and organizations as a concrete approach to Build Back Better.

In the second part, Prof. Kuno, Mr. Tanaka, and Prof. Usuda, who gave lectures in the first part, were invited as panelists to hold a panel discussion on the theme of ” Toward the Realization of a Resilient Society with New Normal -Reflections brought about by the COVID-19-“. The panelists had cross-disciplinary discussions on ICT, literacy, and Japanese-style innovation, which were the common keywords of the three presentations, beyond their own specialties and types of institutions. In addition, many questions were asked from the audience by using the Q&A function of the Zoom webinar, and the discussion was very successful.

According to the questionnaire (collection rate: 45.7%), 88% of the respondents were satisfied with the symposium. In this symposium, we were able to reconfirm the high level of social interest in risk and resilience in the era of New Normal, and we were also able to disseminate the activities of the Resilience Research and Education Promotion Consortium to participants nationwide through the online symposium.

Figure 1 At the time of Panel Discussion (Clockwise from left top: Mr. Tanaka, Prof. Usuda, Prof. Kuno, and Prof. Endo)

MC: Takashi NISHIDE (Associate Professor, Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems, University of Tsukuba)

For the Event Announcement, please visit here.