ITR-RESCUE is part of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and its IT infrastructure is provided by Responsphere |
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DQSA (Distributed Queue Switch Architecture) or Routerless Routing and Switchless SwitchingDr. Graham Campbell (right)
Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
Ether2 Corp.
Communications across Crises: Socio-behavioral aspects of emergent forms of communication in disaster research and Hurricane Katrina Speakers: Christine Bevc and Sophia Liu, Graduate Students, Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado at Boulder
Although disasters have occurred throughout the past hundreds of centuries, hazards and disaster research has only just emerged in the past century. This highly interdisciplinary field of study has brought together members of academic, professional, practitioner, and political areas to better understand how society can prepare and respond to the inevitable. This paper provides a cursory introduction into the social and behavioral aspects of hazards and disaster research. In the context of Hurricane Katrina, this paper examines how the series of events that have provided the opportunity for new forms of communication to emerge. In the past decade, the advances in technology have allowed people to interact in innovative ways. Especially during disaster events, various communication mediums (such as mobile phones, wikis, blogs, podcasts, etc.) are being used to disseminate information to the public, which includes victims, survivors, responders, and volunteers. Because communication is one of the top priorities in the response to catastrophic events, the public, academia, non-profits, and other open source communities must work together to ensure that simple, yet effective means of communication are in place when key infrastructures are deteriorated in disaster events.
Speaker: Karim Hassib, Graduate student, Networked Systems, ICS
The IEEE Standard 802.16-2004, commercially known as WiMAX, combines both IEEE 802.16-2001 and IEEE 802.16a-2003 to form a unified standard for fixed BWA. The standard addresses the frequencies from 10-66 GHz in a line of sight (LoS) mode of operation, and the frequencies from 2-11 GHz in a non LoS mode; it provides specifications for the PHY and the MAC layer of the system. The standard is designed for use in a point-to-multipoint network topology where a base station transmits to multiple subscriber stations in a cellular coverage area. It also supports different types of traffic with various QoS requirements, e.g. voice, video and data. This tutorial covers the basics of the IEEE802.16-2004 Standard, with emphasis on the MAC part.
Speaker: Titus Sanchez
In order to predict the location and movement of people at given times of the day, data must be gathered concerning the entrances and exits of people into different rooms and buildings. Throughout the CalIT2 building several cameras were installed and this presentation describes their usage in counting the number of entrances and exits of people during the day. Counting is done in real-time and identifying data is removed to preserve privacy.
Speaker: Alfred Anguiano
The 911 system is an integral part of today's society, sending law enforcement personnel and medical vehicles as needed. However, this system can still succumb to a information overload, especially in disaster type scenarios, so dispatcher efficiency and situational awareness is a necessity. One solution to this problem is to make it easier for dispatch centers to easily collaborate with one another. The purpose of this research is to automate and accurately represent 911 dispatch voice data using four separate techniques: natural language processing, information extraction, an event based spatio-temporal model, and a gis interface. If a system based on these techniques would be used nationally, it would allow for dispatchers to know to a large extent what is occurring at any other point across its system at any time, allowing for easier coordination and higher situational awareness
Speaker: Ravi Chandra Jammalamadaka
This talk describes the design for the Pvault software, which is a personal data manager that stores and retrieves data from a remote untrusted data server securely. The major advantage of Pvault is that it allows users to access their personal data from any trusted remote computer. Data confidentiality and Integrity are preserved using cryptographic techniques. Pvault also prevents phishing and pharming attacks and solutions for the same are described.
WTC Organizational Networks - Examining Functional Networks and Organizational InvolvementSpeaker: Christine Bevc
In the days following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, researchers in the field and in the lab began collecting data on the functional relationships among organizations participating in the initial response and recovery efforts. These functional relationships were defined by specific tasks and activities, such as building inspection and repair, counseling, debris management, and other specific interactions between organizations. Present analyses are focused on describing the size and characteristics of the larger organizational network and functional subnetworks with particular attention directed to the heterogeneity of the types of organizations involved. For example, what types of organizations were involved in specific functional subnetworks, such as debris management? Were these organizations public or private, profit or non-profit, or, if they were a government agency, did they operate at the federal, regional, state, or local level. In addition to providing detailed insight into the organizational relationships, research findings will address the practical implications for emergency planners, first responders, governmental agencies, and other individuals and organizations involved in catastrophic and near catastrophic events.
People ForecastingSpeakers: Vibhav Gogate and Jon Hutchins
Presentation Slides:
Where are the people? - Hutchins
Where are the people going? - Gogate
As a weather forecast is valuable to someone planning an outdoor activity, imagine the value of “people forecasting” tools which accurately predict the location and movement of people to those in emergency situation assessment, response, planning and simulation. This Friday, Vibhav and Jon will discuss their progress in developing these people forecasting tools. Jon will propose a Bayesian Network model for the estimation of the number of people at different locations across a geographical area such as the UCI campus and Vibhav will demonstrate how to learn and predict travel activities of individuals given their GPS log.
Speaker: Hojjat Jafarpour
DrillSim Project Speakers: Vidhya Balasubramanian and Daniel Massaguer
Responding to natural or man-made disasters in a timely and effective manner can reduce deaths and injuries, contain or prevent secondary disasters, and reduce the resulting economic losses and social disruption. DrillSim is a multi-agent crisis simulator that plays out the activities that occur during a crisis response (e.g., evacuation) from the perspective of IT solution integration. DrillSim models different response activities at both the macro and micro level with emphasis on the information flow between different entities. DrillSim is a plug-and-play system such that IT solutions can be plugged in at different interfaces between these activities or at some point of the information flow in order to study their impact on disaster management and response. This plug-and-play capability also provides flexibility in changing the models that drive the simulation such as the crisis, human, or geography model.
DrillSim also has capabilities to integrate real-life drills into the simulated response activity using the Responsphere framework, which is an instrumented environment with sensing and communication capabilities embedded in part of the UCI campus.
Version 0.2 of DrillSim presents a simulation of evacuation inside the Calit2 building, demonstrated with the purpose of testing IT solutions. The simulator demonstrates the activity of evacuation within the building, the roles played by different agents (floor warden and evacuees), and the information exchange between agents. The physical space of the Calit2 building is integrated using the cameras in the Responsphere framework.
SAMI: Situational Awareness from Multi-modal Input Speaker: Dr. Naveen Ashish
Presentation Slides:
Presentation 1
Presentation 2
This talk describes our vision of SAMI - a system for extracting, managing, and querying situational information. Systems for managing situational awareness information are important in RESCUE in that they serve as a platform for developing situational awareness applications, much in the same way a DBMS serves as a platform for building enterprise information applications. What makes building such systems challenging is the fact that we are managing event oriented information which is semantically rich, and also that information about events and situations is not available per se but rather has to be extracted from raw multi-modal input.
We outline several research challenges in building such systems that include information extraction, disambiguation, reasoning with location information, graph languages for analysis, and searching of datasets.
The talk will be accompanied by demos of various prototypes and tools that graduate students are building in the above research areas.
Speaker: Vinayak Ram
We present an overview of powerline communications (PLC) covering the challenges, motivation and current trends. We describe how the LonWorks Technology by Echelon can be used for communication between sensors via powerlines. Other topics include exploring potential areas of deployment and a comparison of PLC with wireless technologies. We plan to leave ample time for Q&A and general discussion.
Biography
Ram is a MS/ PhD student in the Networked Systems Program in ICS. He is currently involved in a project which explores the use of Powerline Communications as an alternative backbone for sensor networks. An avid mountaineering and hiking enthusiast, he was a part of the team that summited a 5500m unnamed peak in the Kumaon Himalayas in 2003. During the summer of 2004, he was involved in a community teaching program in the remote areas of Lahaul-Spiti , India . He is currently getting used to living a life without public transport in sunny SoCal.
Security Solutions for RESCUESpeaker: Jason Holt, Ph.D. Student, BYU Internet Security Research Lab
Abstract:
We present a wide variety of techniques for preserving security and privacy with respect to ResCUE projects. In particular, we will describe how Logcrypt can be used to provide tamper resistance for sensitive data collection devices and how Hidden Credentials can improve efficiency, privacy and policy enforcement for data delivery and authentication systems. Other topics will include content-triggered trust negotiation, which can generate security policies on the fly based on message contents, and surrogate trust negotiation, which allows mobile devices to offload complex and sensitive security decisions to remote repositories. We plan to leave ample time for Q&A and general discussion.
Biography:
Jason is a Ph.D. student from BYU's Internet Security Research Lab. His dissertation is on Hidden Credentials, and his MS Thesis was on Logcrypt. In 2002 he received a BSCS from BYU with a minor in Ballroom Dance. He is a long time amateur radio operator and electronics hobbyist, recently headed the avionics team for the Unity IV hybrid rocket, and edited a book on classical singing technique which had nothing to do with electronics or computers. He was involved in a disaster response program for the Solano County OES from 1991-1994, during which time he worked as a radio operator and ran a telephone BBS. He is currently trying to find a used Toyota Camry to buy and housing in the area which will cost less per month than he paid for his first car.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Numbers 0331707 and 0331690. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation
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