Welcome to the Humanitarian demining R&D blog. The purpose of this blog is to provide a forum for researchers and end users in humanitarian demining to exchange views and to start collaborations. The initial step of this effort is supported by an award from the UK Royal Academy of Engineers (RAE).

We will create an initial group of engineering researchers who will try to engage with end users and obtain feedback on the research they are doing. We will also keep Philanthropists informed about the technology needs and other practical problem faced at the ground level.

About me: At present, I am an academic in the Department of Informatics, King's College London. I was born in Sri Lanka, where there has been a 30 year long war that left behind a large number of anti-personal landmines to be cleared before re-settlement of civilians. When I was at University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, my laboratory tried to train mongoose to detect landmines, which was also featured in Harvard magazine. I also tried to develop semi-autonomous mobile robots to either carry metal detectors or to guide trained animals like mongoose in unchartered terrain. With the above R&D work, I engaged with several NGOs and Government groups that were involved in demining.

Why I am interested in this public engagement project: Having tried various ways to contribute some technology for humanitarian demining for more than 10 years, still none of what I tried is being used on the ground level on a regular basis. Still, vast majority of end users choose gardening rakes or metal detectors despite their high false alarm rate. One of the barriers to introduce more efficient technologies often quoted by end-users is that the technology must be simple enough to suit the local people being employed in many demining projects in the World. I am not entirely convinced that it is the technology that causes the problem, because most of these so-called "underprivileged" local people use mobile phones and use reasonably sophisticated other electronic consumer products in their households. So, the problem is more likely to be in the user interface or in the recommended training procedures. There can be other reasons why most technologies do not reach the ground level. This public engagement project is to share views of other research engineers and end-users to charter a new interdisciplinary engagement approach to empower both academic researchers and end-users so that the affected communities in nearly 70 countries in the World will see faster and safer humanitarian demining methods at the ground level.

How to write posts: Please email me your posts with a suggested title.