CalMesh

CalMesh is an ad-hoc network of small, lightweight, and easily reconfigurable nodes that quickly self-organize to form a reliable wireless mesh network. CalMesh is designed to be rapidly deployed at the site of a crisis to restore the communication fabric crucial to emergency response, and has been used in conjunction with drills of the San Diego Metropolitan Medical Strike Team (MMST), a team of local, state, and federal responders who work together to develop and implement response plans for major urban crises and disasters. CalMesh nodes use IEEE 802.11b-based Wi-Fi technology for users to easily set up communication during emergencies. The intelligent gateway nodes communicate with each other using an advanced wireless multi-hop relaying process. CalMesh nodes can use any of a variety of wired and wireless backhauls, which are integrated with the Always Best Connected system to allow users to seamlessly roam across and aggregate multiple network infrastructures and access technologies to maintain constant and optimal connection to the Internet.

http://calmesh.calit2.net

Drill Sim

The Responsphere team is creating evacuation and drill simulation software.  The Evacuation Plan Simulator enables you to simulate occupant behavior in the event of a building evacuation, identify potential problems and verify the benefits of IT solutions.  The software will integrate the reality of the Smartspace infrastructure with the virtual reality of a simulated drill and evacuation.  The software will be available for Responsphere customer download in a few weeks. For more information, visit the Evacuation Plan Simulator Project Homepage at: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~projects/drillsim

Download (84 mb) our latest DrillSim video.

Extraction

Download (167 mb) a video describing our work in extraction. In the video, we outline several research challenges in building such systems that include information extraction, disambiguation, reasoning with location information, graph languages for analysis, and searching of datasets.

NUTSO (Nonuniform Tiled System Optiportal)

Calit2 at UCSD is developing a system to provide advanced emergency response visualization capabilities when coupled with a collection of existing and emerging software tools under development in the OptIPuter project. The system would include an array of high brightness tablet PCs and two high brightness(outdoor viewable) HDTV monitors, and a visualization cluster to drive the displays. Applications of tiled display walls include the visualization of large remote sensing, volume rendering imagery, mapping, seismic interpretation, museum exhibits and other applications that require a large collaborative screen area.

People Counters

How do the first responders know where the people are during a disaster? The problem is there is no elegant solution for the real-time localization of people.

Download (89 mb) a video where we present a unique solution to this problem utilizing a number of disparate information sources.

People Forecasting

Download (297 mb) a video where we present methods for forecasting the destination of people. We create an Origin/Destination Matrix as an input to transportation simulations.

Powerline Communications (PLC)

Some of our research in this area involves the use of LonWorks Technology by Echelon to communicate between sensors via powerlines. Other topics include exploring potential areas of deployment and a comparison of PLC with wireless technologies.

Download (357 mb) a video of a talk describing our work in Powerline Communications.

Prototype Vehicle for Command & Control in Emergency Response

The Wireless Communications Command and Control Vehicles will consist of a trailer pulled by a crew-cab pick-up truck.

Besides wireless communications communication equipment, the vehicle will contain a portable outdoor multi-monitor LCD display array (NUTSO) to display large scale tables, figures, maps, and graphs that can be changed to suit the needs of the team. In addition, we will equip the command and control vehicle with a poster-size printer fed with special waterproof paper to create large maps and tables that team members can layout on tables, scribble on, and take out into the field.Technologies developed to date for the vehicle include A WiFi Public Address System for Disaster Management, Mesh Network Antenna Caddy, and a Flexible Satellite Deployment System.

View a pdf presentation of the Command & Control Vehicle.

pVault

pVault is the software tool for password generation and protection. It provides a secure service for people to store their strong passwords encrypted on the third-party storage and retrieve them back whenever necessary. Decryption is done at a trusted machine thereby preventing even the remote server to have any knowledge about the user's passwords.

RelDC

This is a framework that achieves very accurate disambiguation by analyzing relationships between entities.

Download (33 mb) a video of a talk describing our work in this area.

Situational Awareness from Multimodal Input (SAMI)

The SAMI project is developing a system for extracting, managing, and querying situational information. Systems for managing situational awareness information are important in RESCUE in that they serve as a platform for developing situational awareness applications, much in the same way a DBMS serves as a platform for building enterprise information applications. What makes building such systems challenging is the fact that we are managing event oriented information which is semantically rich, and also that information about events and situations is not available per se but rather has to be extracted from raw multi-modal input. For more information, visit the SAMI Homepage at: http://sami.ics.uci.edu

Download (442 mb) a video of a talk describing the vision of SAMI.