{"id":20520,"date":"2025-03-28T10:18:46","date_gmt":"2025-03-28T14:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/?p=20520"},"modified":"2025-03-28T10:18:46","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T14:18:46","slug":"turning-the-tide-on-flood-reporting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/turning-the-tide-on-flood-reporting\/","title":{"rendered":"Turning the Tide on Flood Reporting"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"A
Raman Lakshmanan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Raman Lakshmanan, Ph.D., specialist professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and recent computer science graduate Ava Taylor \u201923 successfully filed a non-provisional U.S. patent and trademark application for FLUDZ, a crowd-sourced flood data distribution service. The application was granted in December and is the University\u2019s first patent in nearly two decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The service originated from Taylor\u2019s honors thesis research on the lack of flood data at the local level and the need for a cost-effective way to report and track flooding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the FLUDZ service, users can report flooded areas, worsening conditions, road hazards, flood depth estimates, and more in real time, while also receiving information on safe evacuation routes. <\/p>\n\n\n

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\"A
Ava Taylor<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

According to Lakshmanan and Taylor, current emergency alert systems are not as effective as they could be in protecting the public during flood events. This app aims to fill a void at the local level for more than 167 million people in the U.S. exposed to flood risks\u2014a number expected to increase as climate, urbanization, and land use changes progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The system and method for local flood data collection and distribution developed for FLUDZ could also be adapted for other applications, including pollution reporting, tree\/plant disease tracking, reservoir overflow monitoring, and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A professor-student collaboration leads to an innovative app\u2014and Monmouth\u2019s first patent in 18 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":20521,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"image_focus":"","hide_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-currents"],"thumbnail":"\"\"","catString":"Currents","issue":"Spring 2025","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20520"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20908,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20520\/revisions\/20908"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}