RAPID: Interactive Internet Outages Visualization to Assess Disaster Recovery

飓风和暴风雪等自然灾害在美国和全球造成经济和社会混乱。急救人员需要有关问题严重程度的信息，市民需要有关亲友居住的城市的信息，政府规划者和研究人员希望设计更强大的基础设施。然而，在灾难期间，有关问题位置和恢复速度的信息可能很慢，而且往往在灾难发生几天甚至几周后仍然不准确和不完整。互联网中断测量可以作为传感器来测量自然灾害的影响。首席研究人员和他的团队已经证明，可以从几个中心站点观察到互联网中断--他们在三眼望远镜上的工作得到了同行的审查，两年多来，他们一直在收集数据，一周七天，每天二十四小时。严重的自然灾害经常导致互联网中断，通常是由于电线杆故障、洪水或电线断裂造成的电力或通信中断；几个小组已经证明了这种相关性。虽然该团队今天向研究人员提供了停电数据，但外行人甚至科学家目前无法访问这些数据，因为他们无法轻松浏览数据或深入到感兴趣的区域。该项目通过一个新的互动网站访问互联网中断数据，目的是直接帮助公民、急救人员和科学家了解灾害的范围和恢复情况。其次，这个网站和数据被用来将团队的停电数据与灾难的两个“地面真相”停电来源进行比较。基本事实的主要来源将是联邦通信委员会(FCC)的NORS(网络中断报告系统)：这些行业报告的中断是美国政府今天用来评估美国电信系统状况的数据。这项工作将建立在与FCC的持续合作基础上，该团队向FCC提供其停电数据，并与他们合作，将其与FCC的专有数据进行比较。该团队还希望将其数据与公用事业公司停电的公开报告进行比较。这项工作建立了对互联网中可检测到的中断和公用事业中断之间的关系的更好理解。这种理解将通过使研究人员和公众更容易获得当前数据，以及通过我们对三元数据来源和地面真理数据来源的比较来实现。此外，使其他研究人员更容易访问现有的停机数据。这项工作促进了对自然灾害后果和恢复速度的更好和更及时的了解。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Natural disasters such as hurricanes and blizzards cause economic and social disruption in the U.S. and globally. First responders need information about the extent of problems, citizens would like information about cities where friends and relatives live, and government planners and researchers would like to design stronger infrastructure. However, information about the location of problems and speed of recovery can be slow to emerge during a disaster, and often remains imprecise and incomplete days or even weeks afterwards. Internet outage measurements can be a sensor to measure the effects natural disasters. The principal investigator and his team have shown that Internet outages can be observed from a few central sites--their work on Trinocular has been peer reviewed and they have been collecting data twenty four hours a day, seven days a week for more than two years. Serious natural disasters often result in Internet outages, typically because of power or communication loss due to utility pole failure, flooding, or wire breakage; this correlation has been shown by several groups. While the team makes outage data available to researchers today, this data is currently inaccessible to lay-people and even scientists, since they cannot easily browse the data or drill down into regions of interest. This project makes Internet outage data accessible through a new, interactive website, with goals of directly assisting citizens, first responders, and scientists to understand the scope of disasters and their recovery. Second, this website and data is used to compare the team's outage data with two sources of "ground truth" outages from disasters. A primary source of ground truth will be the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) NORS (Network Outage Reporting System): these industry-reported outages are the data the U.S. Government uses today to assess the status of the U.S. telecommunications system. This work will build on ongoing collaboration with the FCC, in which the team provides the FCC with its outage data and works with them to compare it with the FCC's proprietary data. The team also expects to compare its data to public reports of utility outages. This work builds a better understanding of the relationship between detectable outages in the Internet and public utility outages. This understanding will result from making current data more accessible to researchers and the public, and through our comparisons of Trinocular to ground truth data sources. In addition, making existing outage data more accessible to other researchers. This work promotes a better and more timely understanding of the consequences of natural disasters and the speed of recovery.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.