April 2005

RESCUE Team launches the Responsphere Effort

The RESCUE team is building a campus-level hardware and software infrastructure for testing, validating, and demonstrating research artifacts emerging out of the RESCUE project. Responsphere will instrument selected buildings and a section of the UCI campus with a number of sensing modalities and pervasive IEEE 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi and IEEE 802.3 technologies. The sensing modalities include audio, video, RFID, and "people counting" technologies. The video technology consists of a number of fixed Linksys WVC54G cameras (streaming audio as well as video) and several Canon VB-C50 tilt/pan/zoom cameras. The resulting instrumented space termed the UCI Smart-Space will serve as a testbed for technology innovations aimed for the first-responder communities. The UCI smart-space, in conjunction with the GLQ testbed at San Diego, will enable implementation and monitoring of emergency drills and provide a mechanism to incorporate and test a variety of IT solutions in the context of such drills. The GLQ testbed (being developed by the RESCUE team at UC, San Diego) consists of an instrumented smart space in a few blocks of the Gas Lamp Quarter in San Diego downtown.

Already, the RESCUE team, working in collaboration with Linda Bogue of EH&S department at UCI, has utilized the Responsphere infrastructure to monitor an evacuation and a hazmat drill that took place at UCI. The data captured during these drills is being used by researchers to calibrate the multi-agent crisis response simulator called DrillSim being built as part of RESCUE project.

The vision of Responsphere is to eventually open up the infrastructure to the first-responder community & industrial partners to provide a community wide tool for testing and validating IT solutions for crisis management. For more information on the Responsphere Infrastructure, please visit our website at: http://www.responsphere.org and/or contact Chris Davison, Technology Manager for Responsphere (cbdaviso@ics.uci.edu).

Rescue Team builds a portal to track Tsunami News Coverage: In the immediate aftermath of the Boxing day Tsunami disaster in S.E Asia, the RESCUE team created a portal that tracks a variety of data sources (including news reports from around the world, videos, blog reports, etc.) pertaining to the Tsunami disaster. Data extraction and clustering techniques developed by RESCUE researchers were used classify reports based on their spatial and temporal properties, as well as their topics covered in the reports. Utilizing the portal, analysts (users) can quickly search and analyze relevant documents. For instance, an analyst can query the system for articles about relief operations facilitated by The Red Cross. These results can be visualized to study the spatial and temporal evolution of the relief operation, for instance. The portal system built is being significantly enhanced and over the coming year. The RESCUE researchers are developing technology to create a rapidly deployable web-based disaster tracking tool that can provide consistent and reliable information in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.