Crossing Boundaries: Pracademia and the Connective Tissue of Information Science for Disaster-Resilient Bangkok

Sunday, November 8, 2026, 8:30 AM

Assoc. Prof. Tavida Kamolvej serves as Deputy Governor of Bangkok, overseeing key portfolios in public health, emergency services, and strategic administration. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Administration and Public Policy from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, USA. Her areas of management included the Medical Services Department, Public Health Department, and Bangkok Fire and Rescue Department. She also oversaw the Strategy and Evaluation Department, the Office of Bangkok Civil Service, and Navamindradhiraj University. Prior to that role, she served as Dean of the Faculty of Political Science at Thammasat University, Thailand. She has contributed to national policy as a member of the National Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Committee. Her policy work also includes serving on the Participatory and Open Government Committee under the Office of the Public Sector Development Commission. She has been a developer and evaluator for the Public and Private Chief Innovation Leadership Program at Thailand’s National Innovation Agency. Internationally, she has served as a Visiting Professor at Meiji University, Japan, and as a Disaster Risk Management Advisor. Her advisory engagements span the Pacific Disaster Center (USA), USTDA, USAID, UNESCO, and UNDP, reflecting her global expertise in disaster risk management and public administration.

Description: Disasters do not respect boundaries. Floodwater does not stop at a district line; PM2.5 does not check which agency owns the sensor; a heatwave does not distinguish between a university dataset and a city dashboard. Yet our institutions, our disciplines, and our data remain organized in silos. This keynote argues that if hazards cross the boundaries of language, knowledge, interoperability, discipline, and governance, then those who manage them must learn to cross the same five boundaries too.

The central proposition is Pracademia, the space where practice and scholars are engaged at once. It is the bridge between knowledge and action, research and implementation, data and decision, technology and people, universities and city, experts and communities. For a megacity like Bangkok, low-lying, densely populated, and exposed to flooding, extreme rainfall, urban heat, PM2.5, fire, accidents, and public-health emergencies. This bridge is not a luxury. It is an infrastructure.

Information Science and Technology is not only a tool bolted into disaster response; it also allows connectivity that lets a city communicate across the full cycle of prevention, preparedness, response, recovery, and resilience. Bangkok has already launched several working examples. Traffy Fondue routes citizens' reports to the agencies responsible for acting on them. Flood EWS-Bangkok turns radar rainfall nowcasts into street-level flood warnings. AirBKK brings air-quality information to residents' phones, and the BKK Risk Map draws ten urban hazards into a single view. In the days after the March 2025 earthquake, residents filed building-crack reports through that same citizen platform while a newly installed structural-monitoring system at City Hall helped the administration judge which buildings were safe to reoccupy. Each case shows technology working, and each also exposes where boundaries still block value, because the decisive question is no longer "does the technology exist?" but "can data and knowledge cross the boundaries between those who hold them?"

The answer lies in treating Bangkok as an urban living lab, a city where academia and practitioners jointly experiment, learn, iterate, and generate knowledge from real problems, from university–city collaborations. Bangkok city lab allows conceptualization to dance around in the sandboxes and helps the management understand what works and what not. The invitation to this audience of information scientists, researchers, and students is direct: become pracademics, cross the five boundaries with us, and help turn Bangkok's data into urban resilience.