A decade on from the devastating Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia, we are at a point where computer simulations of community evacuations are starting to be used within the emergency services. While fire progression modelling is embedded in strategic and operational settings at all levels of government across Victoria, modelling of community response to such fires is only just starting to be evaluated in earnest. For community response models to become integral to bushfire planning and preparedness, the key question to be addressed is: when faced with a bushfire, what will a community really do? Typically this understanding has come from local experience and expertise within the community and services, however the trend is to move towards more informed data driven approaches. In this paper we report on the latest work within the emergency sector in this space. Particularly, we discuss the application of Strahan et al.'s self-evacuation archetypes to an agent-based model of community evacuation in regional Victoria. This work is part of the consolidated bushfire evacuation modelling collaboration between several emergency management stakeholders.

This morning, Google went out of service, as it seems to be caused by a hacker's attack, making millions of people unable to access their Google accounts, including Gmail and YouTube, after the world's largest search engine crashed. This comes just days after a significant breach of US Government agencies by Russian hackers. The outage lasted for more than an hour. Well, I may say that 2020 has been a hard enough year up to here, but having the most important cloud services platform out-of-service can set the bar when it comes to the Worst year ever index. And while it looks like various services are starting to come back again, I'm taking this morning as an excellent opportunity to put ourselves one question: What would our lives be like if Google services suddenly stopped working, forever?

The Jetson Nano was released by NVIDIA in March 2019 as a competitor to the Raspberry Pi. It has 256 CUDA cores - making it significantly more powerful than the Raspberry Pi at graphics intensive operations. The Donkey Car platform was developed a number of years ago and is comprised of a community of more than 5000 people around the world. It is an open-source project with the aim of creating cheap autonomous cars. When the Jetson Nano was released, everyone got really excited of the possibilities for a cheap, powerful autonomous car kit.

Bushfires pose a significant threat to Australia's regional areas. To minimise risk and increase resilience, communities need robust evacuation strategies that account for people's likely behaviour both before and during a bushfire. Agent-based modelling (ABM) offers a practical way to simulate a range of bushfire evacuation scenarios. However, the ABM should reflect the diversity of possible human responses in a given community. The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) cognitive model captures behaviour in a compact representation that is understandable by domain experts. Within a BDI-ABM simulation, individual BDI agents can be assigned profiles that determine their likely behaviour. Over a population of agents their collective behaviour will characterise the community response. These profiles are drawn from existing human behaviour research and consultation with emergency services personnel and capture the expected behaviours of identified groups in the population, both prior to and during an evacuation. A realistic representation of each community can then be formed, and evacuation scenarios within the simulation can be used to explore the possible impact of population structure on outcomes. It is hoped that this will give an improved understanding of the risks associated with evacuation, and lead to tailored evacuation plans for each community to help them prepare for and respond to bushfire.

It's not for the lack of trying or spending millions on developing and building huge data systems, the problems are many but can be traced back to one simple thing; Clients have been sold that data gives them the answers and that big data will close the loop for them to understand the upstream and downstream thinking of their customers, WRONG. Douglas Adam's said "But even Amazon has only got part of the picture. Like real world shops, they can only record the sales they actually make. What about the sales they don't make and don't know that they haven't made because they haven't made them?" Douglas Adams "The Salmon of Doubt" by Permission of Pan Macmillan. That pretty much covers the problem if you extrapolate the thinking for Data Analytics, Big Data or even Artificial Intelligence based Data and Decision systems.

It's not for the lack of trying or spending millions on developing and building huge data systems, the problems are many but can be traced back to one simple thing; Clients have been sold that data gives them the answers and that big data will close the loop for them to understand the upstream and downstream thinking of their customers, WRONG. Douglas Adam's said "But even Amazon has only got part of the picture. Like real world shops, they can only record the sales they actually make. What about the sales they don't make and don't know that they haven't made because they haven't made them?" Douglas Adams "The Salmon of Doubt" by Permission of Pan Macmillan. That pretty much covers the problem if you extrapolate the thinking for Data Analytics, Big Data or even Artificial Intelligence based Data and Decision systems.

It's not for the lack of trying or spending millions on developing and building huge data systems, the problems are many but can be traced back to one simple thing; Clients have been sold that data gives them the answers and that big data will close the loop for them to understand the upstream and downstream thinking of their customers, WRONG. Douglas Adam's said "But even Amazon has only got part of the picture. Like real world shops, they can only record the sales they actually make. What about the sales they don't make and don't know that they haven't made because they haven't made them?" Douglas Adams "The Salmon of Doubt" by Permission of Pan Macmillan. That pretty much covers the problem if you extrapolate the thinking for Data Analytics, Big Data or even Artificial Intelligence based Data and Decision systems.