Overview of Research at CERT

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Overview of Research at CERT

• Prof. Sharad Mehrotra
• Donald Bren School of Information and Computer
  Sciences
• Director, Center for Emergency Response
  Technologies
• Nov 4th, 2009

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Center for Emergency Response Technologies

• CERT Goals
• lead research, technology development
  coordination of ongoing projects on
  role of IT to improving emergency response.
• provide a forum for collaboration between
  academia, industry, and government agencies.
• 20 associated faculty, 40 students, staff,
  programmers, researchers
• Computer Science, Social Science, Engineering
• Close partnerships with local state agencies,
  industry.
• City of LA, city of SD, OCFA, LA Fire,
• Funded by grants from NSF and DHS
• Including 15 million award for Project
  RESCUE/Responsphere

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CERT Faculty Involved
Multidisciplinary faculty from computer science,
engineering, social sciences, statistics and
medicine

• Jay Jayakrishnan
• Dmitri Kalashnikov
• Chen Li
• Aditi Majumder
• Gloria Mark
• Gopi Meenakshisundaram
• Sharad Mehrotra, Director
• Bonnie Nardi
• Deva Ramanan
• Walt Scacchi
• Padhraic Smyth
• Nalini Venkatasubramanian

• Naveen Ashish
• Scott Bartell
• Carter Butts
• Marlon Boarnet
• Mike Carey
• Nikil Dutt
• Rina Dechter
• Magda El Zarki
• Rufus Edwards
• Alex Ihler
• Ramesh Jain
• Steve Jenks

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CERT Partners
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CERT Vision

• Right Information to the Right Person at the
  Right Time
• can result in dramatically better
  response

• Response
• Effectiveness
• lives property saved
• damage prevented
• cascades avoided

• Quality of
• Decisions
• first responders
• consequence planners
• public

Quality Timeliness of Information

• Situational
• Awareness
• incidences
• resources
• victims
• needs

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Multimodal Situational Awareness in Response
Awareness enhances Response
Sensors create awareness
Response Planning
Situational Awareness
Operational planning _at_ crisis site
Physical World
Events, people, resources
Consequence Analysis _at_ EOC
Control actions
Transportation Infrastructure
Incident level Response
Evacuation planning, dangerous routes, occupancy
analysis, exposure analysis
Location of victims, hazardous material, status
of fire fighters
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CERT Structure
INFORMATION ANALYSIS
INFORMATION SHARING
INFORMATION COLLECTION
INFORMATION DISSEMINATION
CHAMPAIGN
RESPONSPHERE
TRANSPORTATION
GLQ
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IT Research at CERT

• Infrastructure Level
• Goal
• Resilient infrastructures for sensing,
  computation, communication and Data management
• Challenges/issues
• Graceful performance degradation under extreme
  loads, catastrophic failures, surge demands,
  scalable infrastructure, inexpensive, easy to
  deploy
• Information Level
• Goal
• Real-time Situational Awareness from multimodal
  inputs to support decision making
• Challenges/issues
• Diversity of information sources, multiple
  modalities, and needs, uncertainty in data,
  challenge of scale, human-as-a-sensor
• Deployment and Societal Issues
• Goal
• Enable technology solutions to work in societal
  scale deployments
• Challenges/issues
• Privacy, Novel IT practices, Cost/Culture,
  Reliability, Digital Divide

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IT Infrastructure Research _at_ CERT

• Reliable Networking at the Crisis Site
• Cognitive MANETS that self-adapt at all levels
  of protocol stack to adjust to load and add
  robustness (Jafarkhani/Yousefizadeh)
• Disruption tolerant hybrid Instant Networks that
  combine store-n-forward with ABC networks to
  support quality guarantees (Venkat)
• Middleware for reliable Scalable Sensing
• SATWARE Exploit application tolerance to
  errors/delays to build resilience at higher
  layers (Mehrotra/Venkat)
• Reliable Mobile computing platforms
• Power aware cross-layer architectures for mobile
  applications (Dutt/Venkat)
• Scalable Data Management
• ASTERIX Scalable management of massive
  semi-structured databases that leverage
  parallelism (Carey/Li)
• Database as a service reliable secure data
  management in the cloud that provides
  privacy/confidentiality guarantees (Mehrotra)
• Scalable Information Dissemination
• Internet-scale rapid dissemination using P2P
  infrastructure (Mehrotra/Venkat)

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Information Systems Research _at_ CERT

• Sensor Driven Data Analysis
• Anomaly detection event detection in sensor
  streams (Smyth/Ihler)
• Multi-sensor framework for localization
  (Ihler/Mehrotra/Venkat)
• Sensor-driven occupancy analysis forecasting
  (Dechter/Smyth)
• Multimodal Event Detection
• From conversational speech (Kalashnikov/Mehrotra/V
  enkat)
• From textual input (Ashish/Mehrotra)
• From Video/Multimodal Data (Jain/Mehrotra/Ramanan)
  
• Event-based Situational Modeling
• Event representation, event based query
  languages, visualization (Jain/Mehrotra)
• Uncertainty representation and probabilistic
  query processing (Ashish/Dechter/Smyth)
• Multi-sensor Data Cleaning
• GDF a general purpose toolkit for reducing
  uncertainty/improving data quality in event
  databases (Kalashnikov/Mehrotra)

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Societal Scale Deployment Research _at_ CERT

• Understanding societal use of technology in
  disasters
• Project REACT use of ubiquitous technologies to
  respond to disruptions (Mark)
• Social media its role in public awareness /
  crisis communication (Butts/Tierney/Sutton/Venkat)
  
• Instant messaging as a communication modality
  (Jain/Sutton)
• Modeling societal information needs
  characteristics during disasters
• Modeling Information diffusion through social
  networks (Butts)
• Information reliability from new information
  modalities (E.g., blogs, twitter) (Butts)
• Challenges in technology adoption
• Cost cultural barriers to information sharing
  (Sutton/Tierney)
• Privacy and confidentiality in information
  sharing and data collection (Mehrotra/Venkat)

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CERT Projects

• Multiple interdisciplinary projects with other
  academic, and industrial partners
• RESCUE a collaboration of CERT with 6 other
  research organizations/universities supported by
  NSF through its large ITR program
• SAFIRE a collaboration of CERT with Imagecat
  supported by DHS
• Next generation Alternate 911 Systems a
  collaboration of CERT with SRI supported by NSF
• FireTrack Project a collaboration with
  Department of epidemiology and Deltin corporation
  (currently under review)
• Speech-based situational Awareness a
  collaboration with SRI (currently under review)

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RESCUE Project
Funded by NSF through its large ITR program

• The mission of RESCUE is to enhance the ability
  of emergency response organizations to rapidly
  adapt and reconfigure crisis response by
  empowering first responders with access to
  accurate actionable evolving situational
  awareness

1. Extreme Networking at the Crisis Site
2. SAMI Situational Awareness through Multimodal
   Input
3. Policy-Based Information Sharing Architecture
4. Customized Dissemination in the Large
5. Privacy Issues in Deployment
6. MetaSIM An architecture for simulator
   integration

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Situational Awareness for Fire Fighters
(partnership with ImageCat)
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Speech-Based Situational Awareness
(collaboration with SRI)
Acoustic Capture
SA Applications
Acoustic Analysis
Speech
Voice
Amb. Noise

• Motivation
• Radio conversation is the most common
  communication mechanism during crisis response
  amongst responders
• Automatic conversation analysis can significantly
  enhance incident awareness leading to better
  response

• Type of Acoustic Analysis
• Human Speech Who spoke to whom about what from
  where and when
• Ambient Sounds explosions, loud sounds,
  screaming, etc
• Physiological Events cough, gag, excited state
  of speaker, slurring,
• Other features too loud, too quiet for too
  long,

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FireTrack Firefighter Exposure Analysis
(collaboration with Deltin Corp. and Dept. of
Epidemiology )
Goal Reduce toxic exposures to occupational
group - firefighters
The WarnWatch System
Firetrack

• System to combine particulate/CO monitoring,
  physiological sensing with a framework for
  collecting, storing, analyzing and alerting
• Pilot studies with the LA County Fire to
  evaluate the efficacy in structural overhaul and
  in wild land fires
• Longitudinal exposure studies associated with
  specific groups, work tasks and activities

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CERT Testbeds
Different testbeds model information flow
conditions under diverse types of crisis
situations
MetaSim Simulator (Regional Response) An
integrated plug-and-play micro/macro simulation
environment for diverse crisis response
situations. Built in hooks for technology
validation
Responsphere, UCI (incident-level response)

Responsphere (incident response) A Campus-wide
infrastructure to instrument, monitor, disaster
drills to validate technologies
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Responsphere Enables Drills Technology
Evaluation

• Technology Testing Exercise 16 SEP 08
• Bren Hall Evacuation w/Campus Police Department
  UCI Zone Crew 3
• Live Burn with OCFA,LA Fire and Anaheim Fire
• Testing Sensing (human bio-sensing) data
  collection 2nd generation FICB
• SAFIRE / FICB Usability Study 15 MAY 09
• Freeze points identified as critical junction /
  decision points to assess SA with and without FICB

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CERT Artifacts

• Derivative research products of direct relevance
  to first responders
• Mechanism to focus CERT research
• Opportunity for technology transfer
• Some of CERT artifacts are in current deployment
  at partner sites

Disaster Portal in use by City of Ontario since
Sept. 2007 to improve communication of relevant
situational awareness information between first
responder and the public
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Closing Remarks

• CERT Outcomes
• Research
• Robust disruption tolerant IT infrastructures
• SA technologies for transformational improvements
  to the response process by improving decision
  making
• Societal level technology adoption
• Testbeds
• Simulation and instrumented real environments for
  technology testing
• Partnerships and collaborations
• industry and government partnerships

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Closing Remarks

• Future plans for CERT
• Transitioning current and ongoing CERT research
  to first responder
• Technology transfer through CERT artifacts such
  as disaster portal
• Focus research on new opportunities to improve
  response by exploiting the emerging IT revolution
• Cloud computing, database as a service, social
  computing, peer oriented computing, grid
  computing, agent-based technologies, sensor
  networks
• Expand research focus of CERT to beyond crisis
  response
• Societal level adaptive systems, critical
  Infrastructure protection
• Example Smart Grid

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Emergency Response Smart Grid

• Two Perspectives
• Smart Grid as a critical infrastructure
• Disruption, damage to generation distribution
  systems due to Earthquakes, fires, etc.
• Opportunity to leverage vast technology base
  developed for crisis response
• collection, analysis, sharing, dissemination
• Grid as a critical resource
• Data collected by smart grid could be valuable
  for response planning
• Electricity is a vital resource on which other
  infrastructures depend
• Hospitals, shelters, special needs, industry, ..
• Ability to control electric usage could be an
  important tool in effective response planning

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Emergency Response Smart Grid
Emergency Response
Events, people, resources
Response Planning
Situational Awareness
Physical World
Response Actions
Electric Power Needs Hospitals, shelters,
special equipment
State of the grid, outages, damage to
distribution system
Grid Control Actions
Situational Awareness
Distributed Grid Control
Grid Sensors, Smart Meters
Smart Grid