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。急救人员需要了解问题的严重程度，市民希望了解朋友和亲戚居住的城市，政府规划者和研究人员希望设计更强大的基础设施。然而，在灾难发生期间，有关问题位置和恢复速度的信息可能出现得很慢，而且在几天甚至几周后往往仍然不精确和不完整。互联网中断的测量可以作为测量自然灾害影响的传感器。首席研究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Trinocular上的工作已经过同行评审，他们每周7天，每天24小时收集数据，已经持续了两年多。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；有几个研究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机数据，但目前外行人甚至科学家都无法访问这些数据，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交互式网站提供互联网中断数据，其目标是直接帮助公民、急救人员和科学家了解灾难的范围及其恢复。其次，该网站和数据用于将团队的中断数据与灾难造成的“地面真相”中断的两个来源进行比较。地面真相的主要来源是联邦通信委员会（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态的数据。这项工作将建立在与FCC持续合作的基础上，其中团队向FCC提供其中断数据，并与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中断的公开报告进行比较。这项工作有助于更好地理解互联网可检测中断与公用事业中断之间的关系。这种理解将通过使研究人员和公众更容易获得当前数据，并通过我们对Trinocular与地面真实数据源的比较而产生。此外，使其他研究人员更容易访问现有的停机数据。这项工作有助于更好、更及时地了解自然灾害的后果和恢复速度。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.