The second RiverCure workshop took place on 02 June 2022 at Instituto Superior Técnico, signaling the close of this four-year FCT-funded project that brought together INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico and Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente (APA).

The workshop included an overview of the RiverCure project and its main outputs, as well as the mathematical modelling research, laboratory and field work it involved and the conception, implementation and applications of the “RiverCure Portal”.

Ran from June 2018 to June 2022, RiverCure (full title “RiverCure: Curating and assimilating crowdsourced and authoritative data to reduce uncertainty in river flow modelling”) proposed to reduce the uncertainty involved in flood simulation and forecasting, doing so by designing and implementing a novel Web Geographic Information System (GIS) platform — the “RiverCure Portal” — that combines observations and hydrodynamic modelling tools for the operational response, emergency preparedness, and risk assessment stages of the flood risk management cycle.

In addition to combining observations with computer modelling, RiverCure explored recent advances in computer vision and deep learning to classify geo-referenced images of flooding events shared by citizens in social media, evaluating the use of neural networks — computing systems that mimic biological neural networks by processing information through a series of interconnected mathematical functions represented by “artificial neurons” — in discriminating images showing direct evidence of a flood while estimating the severity of the flooding event.

RiverCure was coordinated by Rui Ferreira (IST/CERIS) and Alberto Silva (INESC-ID). Rui Ferreira is Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico and a CERIS Hydraulics Research Group senior researcher. Alberto Silva is researcher within the INESC-ID Information and Decision Support Systems Research Area and Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science of Instituto Superior Técnico.