By Justin Worland
Ahmad Wani isn't your typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Instead of inventing his company in a college dorm room or a Palo Alto garage, he conceived of his big idea while trapped in monsoon floods that rocked Pakistan and northern India.
As Wani and his family spent a week waiting to be rescued in 2014, the then-Stanford University engineering student began to wonder whether first responders have enough information to decide where to focus their resources after a devastating event. Returning to the U.S. to another natural disaster — this time an earthquake in Napa Valley just north of San Fransisco — reinforced the question. "I realized that there’s no science behind response," he says. "There are thousands of 911 calls and response is not necessarily directed to places that need it."
Out of that realization came a plan to reshape disaster management using big data. Just a few months later, Wani worked with two fellow Stanford students to create a platform to predict the toll of natural disasters. The concept is simple but also revolutionary. The One Concern software pulls geological and structural data from a variety of public and private sources and uses machine learning to predict the impact of an earthquake down to individual city blocks and buildings. Real-time information input during an earthquake improves how the system responds. And earthquakes represent just the start for the company, which plans to launch a similar program for floods and eventually other natural disasters.
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