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

在公共安全和应急响应中，成功恢复的关键是报告事件的人与应急管理当局之间及时可靠的沟通。这种能力还应与迅速收集目击者资料相结合，以便成功地调查罪犯或事件的根本原因。最近，众包应用程序已被证明是一种很有前途的工具，可以从大量人群中收集信息。然而，在紧急情况下，由于网络可能会拥塞或底层蜂窝基础设施受损或暂时丢失，这种群集外包解决方案应该是稳健和有弹性的。此外，应该用必要的设备支持对所收集的大量数据进行敏捷分析，以便提供对时间敏感的反馈，并在不同机构之间共享。该项目通过引入一个新颖的框架来解决这些挑战，该框架集成了各种技术和工具，用于大规模基于人群的应急响应系统的建模和操作。该项目通过集成基于云的收集数据快速处理，并通过设备对设备（D2D）通信和网络切片来增强当前系统。该项目的综合研究和教育计划调查(i)通过移动应用程序和管理流程收集大规模关键数据，用于紧急事件调查；（ii）在云计算环境中对收集到的异构数据进行近实时处理，以提取关键信息，如视频和照片中的人物面孔；（三）采用基于d2d的通信作为补充组成部分，以在网络基础设施出现拥塞和故障时提高系统的恢复能力；（四）利用全球网络创新环境（GENI）网络切片作为应急响应中时间敏感通信的专用带宽，并增强系统的广域恢复能力。该项目为应急准备铺平了道路，这是国家优先事项；并支持向智能和互联社区发展。预期的改进将加快对紧急情况的反应，挽救人们的生命，并降低公共安全运营成本。

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.