US Ignite: Collaborative Research: Focus Area 1: Rapid and Resilient Critical Data Sourcing for Public Safety and Emergency Response

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In public safety and emergency response, the key for a successful recovery is on-time and reliable communication between the people reporting the incident and the emergency management authorities. Such capability should further be coupled with rapid collection of eyewitness data for successful investigation of criminals or root causes of the incident. Recently, crowd sourcing applications have proven to be promising tools to gather information with tremendous participation from the crowd. In emergency scenarios, however, such crowd sourcing solutions should be robust and resilient as the network could be congested or the underlying cellular infrastructure is damaged or temporarily lost. Moreover, an agile analysis of the massive amount of data collected should be supported with necessary equipment so that time-sensitive feedback could be provided and shared between different agencies. This project addresses these challenges by introducing a novel framework that integrates various technologies and tools for modeling and operation of large-scale crowd sourcing-based emergency response systems.The project enhances the current systems by integrating a cloud-based rapid processing of collected data and augmenting the system by device-to-device (D2D) communications and network slicing. The project's integrated research and education plan investigates (i) large-scale critical data collection via a mobile app and management process to be used in the investigation of an emergency incident, (ii) near-real-time processing of the gathered heterogeneous data in a cloud computing environment for critical information extraction such as faces of people in the videos and photos, (iii) adoption of D2D-based communication as a complementary component to improve system resilience in case of congestion's and failures in network infrastructure, and (iv) utilization of Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) network slices as dedicated bandwidth for time-sensitive communication in emergency response as well as to enhance wide area resilience of the system. The project paves the way towards emergency preparedness which is a national priority; and supports progress toward smart and connected communities. The anticipated enhancements expedite the response to emergency cases, save people's lives and reduce public safety operation costs.