This study focuses on recovery efforts following the Mid-Niigata Earthquake in October 2004 and the Chuetsu-Oki Earthquake in July 2007 in Niigata Prefecture. Results of a randomsample questionnaire survey conducted in affected areas and throughout the prefecture are analyzed using a life recovery calendar, which identifies disaster damage in affected areas and in Niigata with the objective of systematically understanding the status and process of rebuilding lives. Although the magnitude of devastation and the nature of the disasters differ, both have similar life recovery processes. It is to be noted, however, that the impact of the Mid-Niigata Earthquake lingered over a larger area for a longer period than for the Chuetsu-Oki Earthquake.

Collapsed buildings should be detected with the highest priority during earthquake emergency response, due to the associated fatality rates. Although deep learning-based damage detection using vertical aerial images can achieve high performance, as depth information cannot be obtained, it is difficult to detect collapsed buildings when their roofs are not heavily damaged. Airborne LiDAR can efficiently obtain the 3D geometries of buildings (in the form of point clouds) and thus has greater potential to detect various collapsed buildings. However, there have been few previous studies on deep learning-based damage detection using point cloud data, due to a lack of large-scale datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to develop a dataset tailored to point cloud-based building damage detection, in order to investigate the potential of point cloud data in collapsed building detection. Two types of building data are created: building roof and building patch, which contains the building and its surroundings. Comprehensive experiments are conducted under various data availability scenarios (pre–post-building patch, post-building roof, and post-building patch) with varying reference data. The pre–post scenario tries to detect damage using pre-event and post-event data, whereas post-building patch and roof only use post-event data. Damage detection is implemented using both basic and modern 3D point cloud-based deep learning algorithms. To adapt a single-input network, which can only accept one building’s data for a prediction, to the pre–post (double-input) scenario, a general extension framework is proposed. Moreover, a simple visual explanation method is proposed, in order to conduct sensitivity analyses for validating the reliability of model decisions under the post-only scenario. Finally, the generalization ability of the proposed approach is tested using buildings with different architectural styles acquired by a distinct sensor. The results show that point cloud-based methods can achieve high accuracy and are robust under training data reduction. The sensitivity analysis reveals that the trained models are able to locate roof deformations precisely, but have difficulty recognizing global damage, such as that relating to the roof inclination. Additionally, it is revealed that the model decisions are overly dependent on debris-like objects when surroundings information is available, which leads to misclassifications. By training on the developed dataset, the model can achieve moderate accuracy on another dataset with different architectural styles without additional training.

The Future of Work (FoW) is witnessing an evolution where AI systems (broadly machines or businesses) are used to the benefit of humans. Work here refers to all forms of paid and unpaid labor in both physical and virtual workplaces and that is enabled by AI systems. This covers crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, online labor marketplaces such as TaskRabbit and Qapa, but also regular jobs in physical workplaces. Bringing humans back to the frontier of FoW will increase their trust in AI systems and shift their perception to use them as a source of self-improvement, ensure better work performance, and positively shape social and economic outcomes of a society and a nation. To enable that, physical and virtual workplaces will need to capture human traits, behavior, evolving needs, and provide jobs to all. Attitudes, values, opinions regarding the processes and policies will need to be assessed and considered in the design of FoW ecosystems.

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