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ITR-RESCUE is part of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and its IT infrastructure is provided by Responsphere

Customized Dissemination in the Large

Project Lead: N. Venkatasubramanian (UCI)
Project Participants: UCI – S. Mehrotra, C. Li, UC-B – K. Tierney
Other Project Members: 6 Students, 1 Programmer

Visit the Dissemination Project Website

Project Summary:

This project will focus on information that is disseminated to the public at large specifically to encourage self-protective actions, such as evacuation from endangered areas, sheltering-in-place, and other actions designed to reduce exposure to natural and human-induced threats. Specifically, we will develop an understanding of the key factors in effective dissemination to the public in various disasters and design technology innovations for conveying accurate and timely information to those who are actually at risk (or likely to be), while providing reassuring information to those who are not at risk and therefore do not need to take self-protective action. 

Grand Challenges:

There are three key factors that pose significant challenges (social and technological) to effective information dissemination in crises situations – variation in warning times, determining specificity of warning information to effectively communicate to different populations, and customization of the delivery process to reach the targeted populations in time over possibly failing infrastructures.   Our approach to address these challenges is a focused multidisciplinary effort that (a) understands and utilizes the context in which the dissemination of information occurs to determine sources, recipients, channels of targeted messages and (b) develop technological solutions that can deliver appropriate and accessible information to the public rapidly. The ultimate objective is a set of next generation warning systems that can bring about an appropriate response, rather than an under- or over-response.

Project Focus:

To lend focus to the project, we will address the above challenges in the context of the following two case studies that represent two extremes along the time spectrum:

1. Real-time seismic alerts: Very short term alert technologies such as those currently being studied in the State of California.  Timelines here range from minutes/seconds before impact to 1 hour after impact; our focus consumer will be school and parent populations in the State of California.
2. Longer-term warnings for hurricanes:  Techniques to reach highly diverse populations effectively when ample warning time is available.  The scope of this effort ranges from 3 days before the disaster to 3 days after.

For these scenarios, the scientific grand challenges that will be addressed in our efforts include:

1. Understand dissemination scenarios: by identifying and studying the role of factors involved  in decision making to enable decisions regarding when, what and whom to warn to avert the usual problems of normalcy bias and over-response.
2. Supporting customization needs: through flexible, timely, and scalable technologies including peer-based publish/subscribe architectures.
3. Scalable, robust delivery infrastructure: to build highly scalable, reliable and timely dissemination services from unstable and unreliable resources using a peer-based architecture for both wired and wireless dissemination.

Expected Results and Artifacts:

Expected research outcomes of this work include: (1) a methodology for determining customization needs and for risk communications in adverse situations that incorporates societal implications of the communication (2) systems and strategies for customization notification that supports accurate and rapid targeting of the most vulnerable populations (3) techniques for flash dissemination in crisis contexts that enables delivery of urgent communications to large number of users in a very short period of time over unreliable networks (4) techniques to support efficient use of scarce wireless resources to reach mobile recipients reachable over wireless devices.   Our efforts are expected to culminate in two artifacts: (1) a scalable rapid real-time alert system and (2) a customized risk communications system capable of reaching diverse populations based on context and recipient characteristics.

Plans for Broader Impact and Outreach:

We plan to address the selected scenarios in greater detail by conducting focus groups and stakeholder workshops that include  state and city government officials responsible for real-time alerts and public alerting, members of the scientific and engineering communities dealing with seismic and hurricane events (USGS, NOAA), private organizations (School Broadcasting Company) and potential consumers of alert information (representatives of parent organizations, school officials at various levels). Our outreach partners for the technology developed for Real-time Seismic Alerts to Schools include the Office of Emergency Services for the State of California, the Emergency Preparedness department for the City of Los Angeles and the School Broadcasting Company. RESCUE will contribute to real-time earthquake alert systems that the state is slated to develop for real-time alerts with schools and parents being a specific target consumer.  Our initial outreach partner for longer term warning portals is the City of Ontario Fire Department (OFD) with whom we have initiated the development of the City of Ontario Emergency Information Portal (OEIP) that will bring together various information sources useful to the public in a crisis, handle citizen donation management, and carefully integrate dynamic information available via in-house emergency management software (e.g. WebEOC).