Volume 7, Issue 3

A Marketplace for Peer-to-Peer Charity
by David Pescovitz

After hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, Berkeley Engineering graduate students Ephrat Bitton and Anand Kulkarni watched with the rest of the world as logistical snafus, bureaucratic red tape and communication breakdowns prevented charitable aid from quickly reaching the storm’s victims. There was a disconnect between those who had something to offer and those who needed it.

Since then, the two students in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research have spent their free time developing a Web application to help ensure that such a disconnect would never happen again. Their system automatically pairs donors with those in need, creating a "marketplace of charity" while putting a human face on the process of giving.

"During Hurricane Katrina, there were a lot of people eager to donate, but they didn't feel they had a good way to do that," says Bitton, a graduate student in Professor Ken Goldberg's laboratory. "On the other hand, we noticed an interesting trend where people would offer donations of goods or services on Web forums and community sites like craigslist."

As Web access was restored to Katrina victims, these bottom-up, peer-to-peer approaches to match goods and services with victims worked surprisingly well, even though the websites were not designed for this purpose. But what if they were?

That's the idea behind iCare, Bitton and Kulkarni's Web application that acts as a virtual middleman to link donors and victims. After a disaster, victims can log onto the website and report their specific needs, and those requests will be connected to donors—companies or individuals—who are offering that particular kind of aid. The researchers also hope that this demand-response approach will reduce the wasteful excess of some goods and the shortage of others.

"The next step is to get the supplies from point A to point B as quickly and inexpensively as possible," says Kulkarni, a student of IEOR department chair Ilan Adler’s.

To attack the logistics problem, iCare leverages wasted space on commercial trucks constantly traversing the nation, dropping off goods and returning partially or entirely empty. Once it is fully operational, iCare will access existing databases of shippers willing to donate their empty space. The researchers' algorithm then calculates the best route, often involving a relay race of multiple trucks, to get the donated goods to the victim using just the surplus space.

While iCare is designed from the bottom up to support ad hoc person-to-person aid, Kulkarni adds that they have "no intention of trying to supplant formal disaster response organizations." Far from it. In fact, the researchers are building data mining and visualization features into the system that they hope will make it an appealing tool for aid organizations. The Red Cross, for example, might assess a disaster area and input that data, neighborhood by neighborhood, into iCare. The software could then identify donor groups and commercial organizations best able to provide supplies and equipment they need at the time.

"iCare also provides a real-time map of the geographical distribution of need and urgency," Bitton says. "Many organizations don't have a good idea of that, but we can aggregate that data and display it in a meaningful way that they may find valuable."

Bitton and Kulkarni plan to spend their summer bringing iCare online for an early fall launch. For these two researchers, the system is a natural application of what they've learned studying mathematical modeling and information systems.
 
"We wanted to apply some of our skills to a pressing social problem," Kulkarni says. "There's a massive desire on the part of the public to help after disasters, and they just need a good way to transform that desire into something tangible for the victims."

Find this article at:
http://www.coe.berkeley.edu/labnotes/0607/icare.html