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.

Validation platforms and test-beds will be deployed in close partnership with first responders from the City and County of LA, San Diego and Irvine Police departments as well as the California Office of Emergency Services in live environments and will help us evaluate the effectiveness of the research. The test-beds created as a part of Responsphere will provide the team with an experimental platform to field-test and refine research on information collection, analysis, sharing, and dissemination in controlled yet realistic settings significantly enhancing their research capability. Specific test-beds include: Mobile Incidence Level Response (MILLR) Test-bed Crisis Assessment, Mitigation, and Analysis (CAMAS) Test-bed Advanced Traffic Rerouting for Unplanned Events (TRUE) Test-bed.

At UC Irvine we will (1) expand the campus 802.11b based wireless infrastructure to cover major outdoor regions, (2) add instrumentation and management tools to the campus wireless environment, (3) add compute, visualization and storage capabilities for crisis management and response research, and (4) expand the available pool of mobile devices and embellish them with specialized video capture and streaming capabilities suitable for field response experiments.

At UC San Diego we will (1) establish RF propagation modeling capabilities using GIS and 3D data generation and transformation tools, (2) build a wireless communications infrastructure in the Gas Lamp Quarter downtown, (3) build a command and control prototyping environment in a visualization facility, (4) create a vehicular based mobile command and control platform, (5) design a location/tracking system and prototype it along with other sensing and communications equipment in a custom man worn implementation ("manpack"), and (6) participate in the upgrade of the UCSD Police communication environment.

Specific research components tested in Responsphere are (1) a system for accurate position location in uncertain environments; (2) an integrated end-to-end quality aware distributed data collection system; (3) an end-to-end data analysis system; and (4) system for seamless multimodal interaction involving audio/video and image information. Other research efforts at UCI and UCSD in the areas of mobile computing, networking, middleware, security and ubiquitous computing will benefit from the Responsphere infrastructure.