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。第一反应者需要有关问题程度的信息，公民希望了解朋友和亲戚居住的城市的信息，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，而且往往在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一种传感器来测量自然灾害的影响。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，他们已经连续两年多每周七天，每天二十四小时收集数据。严重的自然灾害通常会导致互联网中断，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损失;这种相关性已经被几个团体证明。虽然该团队今天向研究人员提供了停电数据，但这些数据目前对外行甚至科学家都无法访问，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提供互联网中断数据，其目标是直接帮助公民，第一反应者和科学家了解灾害的范围及其恢复。其次，该网站和数据用于将团队的停机数据与两个来自灾难的“地面实况”停机数据进行比较。地面实况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态的数据。这项工作将建立在与FCC的持续合作基础上，该团队向FCC提供其中断数据，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中断的公开报告进行比较。这项工作建立了一个更好地了解互联网和公用事业中断之间的关系可检测的中断。这种理解将通过使研究人员和公众更容易获得当前数据，以及通过我们将Trinocular与地面实况数据源进行比较来实现。此外，使其他研究人员更容易获得现有的停电数据。该奖项反映了NSF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.