Five major multidisciplinary research projects have been established that together enable the RESCUE team to pursue focused research that supports our mission of dramatically improving the ability of emergency response organizations to gather, process, manage, use and disseminate information during man-made and natural catastrophes. These projects are a new element of the RESCUE program; created to address NSF’s recommendation to focus RESCUE on a few large innovations. Our objective in these projects is to explore novel interdisciplinary research ideas that have the possibility of “high impact” – approaches that are usually difficult to follow when PIs work in isolation along narrowly defined disciplinary boundaries. The specific objectives, grand challenges, broader impact opportunities, and expected results, as well as concrete tasks and timelines for each of these projects, are discussed in a later section of this strategic plan.  

The five projects are:

• Situation awareness (SAMI)
• Information sharing (PISA)
• Robust communications (ENS)
• Information dissemination
• Privacy