NSF Workshop Responding to the Unexpected

1. NSF WorkshopResponding to the Unexpected Yigal Arens Center for Research on Unexpected Events USC Information Sciences Institute crue.isi.edu

2. Genesis of the Workshop

3. Participants • Researchers (42) • Information Technology • Engineering • Social Science • Responders and Practitioners (21) • Federal: FEMA, DOJ/NIJ, USCG, EPA, … • State: California Office of Emergency Services • Local: NYC DOITT, DC Emergency Management • Industry: Con Edison, Urban Logic, HP, … • NSF Representatives (10) • CISE, ENG, SBE

4. Purpose • Examine diversity of unexpected events • Begin to understand and develop • New technical, social and policy requirements • Research agenda • The mechanisms for establishing an adequate research program

5. Unexpected Events • Natural, man-made intentional or accidental • Low-probability, high-impact events within dynamic human environments • Have system-wide effects • Overwhelm existing capabilities • Pre-existing plans and organizations are inadequate • Elements of the response system may be destroyed • Response depends on heroic efforts

6. Preparedness(w/post-action review & learning) UnexpectedEvent Recovery Detection &Understanding Workshop Focus Response Life Cycle of an Unexpected Event

7. Responding to Unexpected Events • Detailed planning may be impractical • But the right: • Policies • Infrastructure • Support • Can yield effective, real-time responses

8. Recommended Research Areas • Infrastructure and its protection • Monitoring technologies, critical infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, performance and response outcomes • Risk analysis • Randomized strategies, regulatory structure, decision-theoretic data analysis, cascading causality, decentralized decision making • Organizational response, support and integration • Formation, structure, operation, multi-agent collaboration, distributed resource allocation, pedagogical agents • Policy, jurisdiction and regulation • Standardized case analysis, meta-model development • Information management • Fusion, validation, presentation, access, exploitation, tailoring, metadata representation, economic and policy implications • Networking and communication • Resilience, sensor networks, rule-based systems security, emergency response, Grid technologies, heterogeneous and ad hoc wireless infrastructure

9. Recommended Program Modalities • Combine studying the past with inventing the future • Create repositories of knowledge about past events • Develop new technologies, policies and procedures • Bridging the operational and research communities • Engage responders in research and researchers in operations • Neither culture traditionally supports this • Contribute to each other’s mission without sacrificing own • Combine theory, experiment, evaluation and application • Long-term research and short-term spin-offs • Small-scale studies and large-scale systems • Large-scale systems, such as in DoD R&D programs, need to be valued for their role in research, education and technology transfer • Simulations/testbeds and the real world • Large-scale simulations/testbeds are necessary to explore large-scale interactions; train/inform; evaluate technologies/policies/procedures; identify weak points; link to real-time sensor/monitoring capabilities • Train responders, educate students and inform community

10. Recommended Support Levels • Grants • Individual: 100 at $100K-$300K per year • Group: 40 at $300K-$1M per year • Centers • Focused: 20-30 at $5M-$10M per year • National: 2-3 at $20M-$30M per year • Total Funding: ~$300M per year

11. Workshop Report • Yigal Arens • Paul Rosenbloom

12. Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure Research for Homeland Security • UC San Diego, February 25-26, 2003 • Organizers: Larry Smarr, Ramesh Rao, Yigal Arens • Goals: Determine, • What can NOT be done today by the crisis management or responder community that can be enabled by the right cyberinfrastructure? • What features can be expected of the cyberinfrastructure in the near future (3-5 years) that might provide new capabilities to the crisis management and responder community?

13. UCSD Workshop Program • First Responder Perspectives • Panels/Subgroupings • Mobile/Ad Hoc Infrastructure • Fixed Infrastructure • (Information/Network) Security • Data/Grid • Collaboration and Decision Support

14. A While Has Passed Since NYC Workshop • The original goals • New technical, social and policy requirements • Research agenda • Mechanisms for establishing an adequate research program • Efforts have been ongoing to: • Continue to refine the requirements and research agenda • Begin implementation

15. Cyberinfrastructure forScience and Engineering Research • Information technology for large-scale, distributed, science and engineering research • Foster leadership in computational science and engineering • Drive a new generation of research • Support dual use with other national priorities • E.g., Homeland Security • Need coherent framework covering what needs to be done • Structured set of topics, with for each topic: • A vision for the development of the topic • Identification of some of the key research issues for the topic

16. Development Organizations Employment Interfaces Environments Grids Networks Platforms A Socio-Technical Framework Thanks to Paul Rosenbloom

17. Development Organizations Employment Interfaces Environments Grids Networks Platforms • Peta-scale performance for large-scale science and engineering • Combination of hardware and systems software

18. Development Organizations Employment Interfaces Environments Grids Networks Platforms • Interconnecting all relevant computational and physical resources • People, man-made objects, natural resources • Distributed throughout natural and man-made environment

19. Development Organizations Employment Interfaces Environments Grids Networks Platforms • Pervasive sharing of distributed resources • Uniform access to networked resources • Computation, equipment, data/information/knowledge, experience • Reflecting policies of resource owners

20. Development Organizations Employment Interfaces Environments Grids Networks Platforms • Consolidated domain environments • Organizing resources over entire domains • A science or engineering discipline • A complex system at multiple length-scales (e.g., the human body) • A geographic region (e.g., the Los Angeles metropolitan area) • A person’s life experiences • Integrating domain understanding and activity

21. Development Organizations Employment Interfaces Environments Grids Networks Platforms • Low overhead interfaces among people and domain environments • Communicate information and instruction • Adapt interactions to needs and situation • Demands, distractions, available services • Work across space and time

22. Development Organizations Employment Interfaces Environments Grids Networks Platforms • Virtual organizations • Groups working together towards common goals • Members may be people and goal-oriented systems (e.g., agents, robots) • Utilize and share resources

23. Development Organizations Employment Interfaces Environments Grids Networks Platforms • Languages and abstractions • For expressing large, complex domain environments • For the activity of large, complex organizations • Compilers and debuggers • For applications with 107 threads • Design and construction • CAD Systems, programming environments • For co-design of semi-custom and embedded hardware/software solutions

24. Development Organizations Employment Interfaces Environments Grids Networks Platforms • Employment • Security/Privacy • Autonomy/Robustness • Scalability • Performance/ Dependability • Usability/Maintainability

25. A Final Note • Cyberinfrastructure is essential to science and engineering • But not only to those: also to social interaction, government, economics, business – as the Internet is, for example • CI’s full range of uses and social implications need to be considered from the start, since omissions and inconsistencies will be difficult and costly to resolve later