Research Focus

To lend focus to the project, we address our research in the context of the following two case studies that represent two extremes along the time spectrum:

  1. Real-time seismic alerts: Very short term alert technologies such as those currently being studied in the State of California.  Timelines here range from minutes/seconds before impact to 1 hour after impact; our focus consumer will be school and parent populations in the State of California.

  2. Longer-term warnings for hurricanes:  Techniques to reach highly diverse populations effectively when ample warning time is available.  The scope of this effort ranges from 3 days before the disaster to 3 days after.

For these scenarios, the scientific grand challenges that will be addressed in our efforts include:

  1. Understand dissemination scenarios: by identifying and studying the role of factors involved  in decision making to enable decisions regarding when, what and whom to warn to avert the usual problems of normalcy bias and over-response.

  2. Supporting customization needs: through flexible, timely, and scalable technologies including peer-based publish/subscribe architectures.

  3. Scalable, robust delivery infrastructure: to build highly scalable, reliable and timely dissemination services from unstable and unreliable resources using a peer-based architecture for both wired and wireless dissemination.