When you’re thinking about South America, disaster preparedness is probably not your first thought. It’s alright, no blame. However, based on this recent conference, you shall add the topic to the list.
Márton Péti (NSKI) went all the way to Ecuador to present B-prepared, putting an emphasis on the IM-Prepared smartphone application, to a professional audience outside of Europe, mainly from South America, at the Escuela Politécnica Nacional (EPN) university in Quito within the framework of the 2026 RSAI World Congress. He detailed the map-based mobile application for disaster preparedness in his presentation titled Increasing resilience in the field of training through location-based solutions powered by new technologies.
The presentation generated significant interest, as well as inspiring discussions and encouraged the audience to download the application. This event in the congress series – where NSKI is a regular guest – offered an excellent opportunity to engage in professional dialogue about our developments with experts from global organizations and universities such as the World Bank, and the universities UNAM, PUCRS, USP, UIDE, EPN, USAL.
RSAI stands for the Regional Science Association International, and their World Congresses are organized every 2-4 years, making us really happy that it coincided with the project’s lifetime. RSAI and its events are one of the two leading organizations dealing with regional sciences. Its congresses are organized in a truly global manner, all around the word, sometimes also in Europe. Therefore, the RSAI world congress is one of the biggest gatherings of regional science professionals in years.
This year’s RSAI World Congress was titled Wellbeing and Sustainability: Regional Science Discussions at the Earth’s Core. It focused on key topics that are particularly relevant to the B-prepared project, including: resilience; innovation; data science; and artificial intelligence; as well as climate and environmental change; and governance.
The presentation is likely to be the first initiative to showcase the potential of the new technologies represented by the B-prepared project in strengthening the resilience of local and regional communities through location-based approaches. These technologies virtually represent the real geographical environment of communities and can thus support their learning and preparedness processes.
The event served as an opportunity to showcase B-prepared’s developments to researchers and professionals working in the fields of regional and urban development, as well as to encourage them to join the application’s platforms and participate in its further development.
