An IT Infrastructure for Responding to the Unexpected

Responsphere is an IT infrastructure test-bed that incorporates a multidisciplinary approach to emergency response drawing from academia, government, and private enterprise. The IT infrastructure can facilitate rapid and seamless access to and dissemination of information.

Timely and effective response to natural or man-made disasters can reduce deaths and injuries, contain or prevent secondary disasters, and reduce the resulting economic losses and social disruption. During a crisis, responding organizations confront grave uncertainties in making critical decisions. There is a strong correlation between the quality of these decisions and the accuracy, timeliness, and reliability of the situational information (e.g., state of the civil, transportation and information infrastructures) and the availability of resources (e.g., medical facilities, rescue and law enforcement units) to the decision-makers.

Recently, at UCI and UCSD many projects have been launched that address the technological challenges in with the objective of radically transforming the ability of organizations to gather, manage, use and disseminate information when responding to man-made and natural catastrophes. Dramatic improvements in the speed and accuracy at which information about the crisis flows through the disaster response networks has the potential to revolutionize crisis response saving human lives and property. The purpose of this infrastructure is to establish a campus-level experimental Information Technology infrastructure, called Responsphere, to serve as a platform for development, testing, and validation of our current research efforts on responding to a crisis.

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