Overview of Research at CERT

1. 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

2. Center for Emergency Response Technologies 2 • 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

3. CERT: Faculty Involved 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 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

4. CERT Partners

5. 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

6. Multimodal Situational Awareness in Response Awareness enhances Response Sensors create awareness Situational Awareness Response Planning Operational planning @ crisis site MULTI-MODAL SENSORS Physical World Events, people, resources Consequence Analysis @ 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

7. CERT Structure Societal Impact - Crisis Response Testbeds Simulations/Drills that mimic crisis response activities System Artifacts IT systems & tools of direct relevance to crisis response Fundamental Research Core research driving new technologies INFORMATION ANALYSIS INFORMATION SHARING INFORMATION COLLECTION INFORMATION DISSEMINATION CHAMPAIGN RESPONSPHERE TRANSPORTATION GLQ

8. 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

9. IT Infrastructure Research @ 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/Yousefi’zadeh) • 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)

10. Information Systems Research @ 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/Venkat) • 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)

11. Societal Scale Deployment Research @ 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)

12. 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)

13. RESCUE Project 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 Funded by NSF through its large ITR program • Extreme Networking at the Crisis Site • SAMI – Situational Awareness through Multimodal Input • Policy-Based Information Sharing Architecture • Customized Dissemination in the Large • Privacy Issues in Deployment • MetaSIM – An architecture for simulator integration

14. Situational Awareness for Fire Fighters (partnership with ImageCat)

15. Speech-Based Situational Awareness (collaboration with SRI) 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, … Acoustic Capture Image & Video Tagging Localization via Speech SA Applications Acoustic Analysis Spatial Messaging Alerts Processing Conversation Monitoring & Playback 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 15

16. 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 16

17. 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

18. Responsphere Enables Drills & Technology Evaluation 18 • 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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