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Pervasive Computing for Disaster Response

The objective of this project is to develop key components of community-based pervasive systems which will allow citizens to respond to disasters. The research will enable a new generation of community-based cyber-physical systems, in which the community helps to detect, communicate and respond to rapidly evolving events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, floods and epidemics. The research has a strong pragmatic focus on developing sensors and software which enable the collection of situational information and the dissemination of alerts. Methods for performing sensing analysis and data fusion in the Cloud are being incorporated so as to address tradeoffs among rates of false positive alarms, false negative alarms, and time to detection. Techniques are also being developed for reliable and timely alerting of communities and individuals; these techniques exploit geographical and societal scale correlations to improve the speed and resilience of the dissemination process.

Project URL:

Geographic Scope: Global, but focused on India and California

Project Status: Complete - not recruiting volunteers

Participation Tasks: Classification or tagging, Data analysis, Geolocation, Identification, Learning, Measurement, Observation,

Start Date: 2011-10-1

Project Contact: julian.bunn@caltech.edu

Federal Government Sponsor:

NSF logo

Other Federal Government Sponsor:

Fields of Science: Disaster response

Intended Outcomes: Programmatic, Research development, Civic and community, Individual learning,