An IT Infrastructure for Responding to the Unexpected

更广泛的影响：及时有效地应对自然灾害或人为灾害，可减少伤亡，遏制或预防次生灾害，并减少由此造成的经济损失和社会混乱。在危机期间，做出反应的组织在做出关键决策时面临着严重的不确定性。这些决策的质量与情景信息（如民用、交通和信息基础设施的状况）的准确性、及时性和可靠性以及决策者可获得的资源（如医疗设施、救援和执法单位）之间存在很强的相关性。最近，在UCI和UCSD已经启动了许多项目来解决技术挑战，目标是从根本上改变组织在应对人为和自然灾害时收集、管理、使用和传播信息的能力。灾难响应网络中有关危机的信息流动速度和准确性的显著提高，有可能彻底改变危机响应方式，挽救人类生命和财产。该基础设施提案的目的是建立一个校园级的实验性信息技术基础设施，称为Responsphere，作为开发、测试和验证我们目前在应对危机方面的研究工作的平台。智力优势：由于问题的规模和复杂性、数据和数据源的多样性、信息流动的通信和信息基础设施的状态以及响应组织的独特性和动态性，在危机响应期间向决策者提供准确、及时和相关的信息面临挑战。为了应对这些挑战，我们的研究团队正在探索一种多学科方法，重点关注危机应对背景下的以下研究要素：(1)使人类（救援人员、观察员）成为重要危机相关信息的丰富来源；(2)在IT基础设施可能部分失效的高动态灾难情况下，无缝地从异构源收集数据；(3)将低水平噪声数据转化为有助于损伤评估和态势感知的有意义事件；(4)在高动态的紧急虚拟组织中实现信息共享和集体决策；(5)以对接受者最有用的形式迅速传播信息，同时注意基础通信和信息技术的基本限制。验证平台和试验台将与洛杉矶市和县、圣地亚哥和尔湾警察局以及加州紧急服务办公室在现场环境中的第一响应者密切合作，并将帮助我们评估研究的有效性。作为Responsphere的一部分创建的试验台将为团队提供一个实验平台，以在受控但现实的环境中对信息收集、分析、共享和传播进行现场测试和改进研究，从而显著提高他们的研究能力。具体的测试平台包括：在加州大学欧文分校，我们将(1)扩展基于802.11b的校园无线基础设施，以覆盖主要的室外区域；(2)为校园无线环境添加仪器和管理工具；(3)为危机管理和响应研究添加计算、可视化和存储功能。(4)扩大可用的移动设备池，并为其提供适合现场响应实验的专门视频捕获和流媒体功能。在加州大学圣地亚哥分校，我们将(1)利用GIS和3D数据生成和转换工具建立射频传播建模能力，(2)在市中心的煤气灯区建立无线通信基础设施，(3)在可视化设施中建立指挥和控制原型环境，(4)创建基于车辆的移动指挥和控制平台。(5)设计一个定位/跟踪系统，并将其与其他传感和通信设备一起设计成原型，并将其安装在定制的男士穿戴设备中（“manpack”），以及(6)参与加州大学圣地亚哥分校警察通信环境的升级。Responsphere测试的具体研究组件有：(1)在不确定环境中进行精确位置定位的系统；(2)集成的端到端质量感知分布式数据采集系统；(3)端到端数据分析系统；(4)涉及音频/视频和图像信息的无缝多模式交互系统。UCI和UCSD在移动计算、网络、中间件、安全和普适计算等领域的其他研究工作将受益于Responsphere基础设施

Broader Impact: Timely and effective response to natural or man-made disasters can reduce deaths and injuries, contain or prevent secondary disasters, and reduce the resulting economic losses and social disruption. During a crisis, responding organizations confront grave uncertainties in making critical decisions. There is a strong correlation between the quality of these decisions and the accuracy, timeliness, and reliability of the situational information (e.g., state of the civil, transportation and information infrastructures) and the availability of resources (e.g., medical facilities, rescue and law enforcement units) to the decision-makers. Recently, at UCI and UCSD many projects have been launched that address the technological challenges in with the objective of radically transforming the ability of organizations to gather, manage, use and disseminate information when responding to man-made and natural catastrophes. Dramatic improvements in the speed and accuracy at which information about the crisis flows through the disaster response networks has the potential to revolutionize crisis response saving human lives and property. . The purpose of this infrastructure proposal is to establish an campus-level experimental Information Technology infrastructure, called Responsphere, to serve as a platform for development, testing, and validation of our current research efforts on responding to a crisis. Intellectual Merit: Challenges in bringing accurate, timely, and relevant information to decision-makers during crisis response arises due to the scale and complexity of the problem, the diversity of data and data sources, the state of the communication and information infrastructures through which the information flows, and the unique character and dynamic nature of the responding organizations. To address these challenges, our research team is exploring a multidisciplinary approach focusing on the following research elements in the context of crisis response: (1) Enabling humans (rescue workers, observers) to become rich sources of vital crisis-related information; (2) Seamlessly collecting data from heterogeneous sources in highly dynamic disaster situations where the IT infrastructure may have partially failed; (3) Translating low-level noisy data into meaningful events useful for damage assessment and situation awareness; (4) Enabling information sharing and collective decision-making across highly dynamic emergent virtual organizations; (5) Rapidly disseminating information in the form most useful to recipients while observing the fundamental limitations of the underlying communication and information technologies. Validation platforms and testbeds will be deployed in close partnership with first responders from the City and County of LA, San Diego and Irvine Police departments as well as the California Office of Emergency Services in live environments and will help us evaluate the effectiveness of the research.The testbeds created as a part of Responsphere will provide the team with an experimental platform to field-test and refine research on information collection, analysis, sharing, and dissemination in controlled yet realistic settings significantly enhancing their research capability. Specific testbeds include: Mobile Incidence Level Response (MILLR) Testbed Crisis Assessment, Mitigation, and Analysis (CAMAS) Testbed Advanced Traffic Rerouting for Unplanned Events (TRUE) TestbedAt UC Irvine we will (1) expand the campus 802.11b based wireless infrastructure to cover major outdoor regions, (2) add instrumentation and management tools to the campus wireless environment, (3) add compute, visualization and storage capabilities for crisis management and response research, and (4) expand the available pool of mobile devices and embellish them with specialized video capture and streaming capabilities suitable for field response experiments. At UC San Diego we will (1) establish RF propagation modeling capabilities using GIS and 3D data generation and transformation tools, (2) build a wireless communications infrastructure in the Gas Lamp Quarter downtown, (3) build a command and control prototyping environment in a visualization facility, (4) create a vehicular based mobile command and control platform, (5) design a location/tracking system and prototype it along with other sensing and communications equipment in a custom man worn implementation ("manpack"), and (6) participate in the upgrade of the UCSD Police communication environment.. Specific research components tested in Responsphere are (1) a system for accurate position location in uncertain environments; (2) an integrated end-to-end quality aware distributed data collection system; (3) an end-to-end data analysis system; and (4) system for seamless multimodal interaction involving audio/video and image information. Other research efforts at UCI and UCSD in the areas of mobile computing, networking, middleware, security and ubiquitous computing will benefit from the Responsphere infrastructure