BDD: Dynamic Evolution of Smart-Phone Based Emergency Communications Network

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Emergency communications networks are crucial for reaching out and helping affected people during long-persisting disasters such as the Tohoku earthquake in Japan or Hurricane Katrina in the US. Because of the ubiquitous availability of smartphones, it is important to integrate them into the emergency communications network consisting of both surviving cellular network and deployed emergency communications infrastructure. All these components vary in their ability to provide necessary communications as the disaster unfolds. It is therefore essential to continuously monitor and ``tune'' the network to provide the best possible coverage and communications capability. This project explores how to interconnect clusters of smartphones via WiFi tethering technology and integrate them with the deployed emergency network. Since the densities of people and hence of smartphones can vary substantially over the affected area, the project will explore mechanisms to conserve battery and other smartphone resources by exploiting overlap/redundancy in the sensed data. Another key issue addressed by the project is the evolution of the emergency network as the disaster situation itself evolves. The project analyzes data obtained from twitter during the disaster in order to get insights into how the network should evolve. Furthermore, the project examines how to deploy the mobile access points initially and later move them to tune the network to the needs of the evolving disaster. The analysis of twitter data involves several bigdata challenges including classification, prioritization, and ordering of tweets so the interpretation and decision making -- which is still expected to be done by humans -- is considerably simplified. The rapidly increasing penetration of smart phones that carry a wide array of sensors makes them ideal for disaster communications. In addition, twitter has established itself as the premier human communication mechanism during disasters owing to its modest technological requirements and ease of use. This project takes these phenomena and stitches them together to create an agile disaster communications network that can provide significant additional value in quickly reaching affected people and collecting crucial data for rushing the required assistance to them. As a part of US-Japan joint program, with research teams from Temple University in the United States and Aizu University in Japan, the project will develop technologies that will be of direct relevance to both countries.