RESCUE Steering Committees
the need
At the end of year 2, we are at a critical juncture of the RESCUE project; where the research directions we have identified needs to be consolidated into a few chosen areas on which we can collectively work to make a major impact with the possibility of resulting in a national level infrastructure/policy change.
This is perhaps the most substantive recommendation by NSF and the site visit team in the recently concluded site review.
Another important direction for RESCUE (identified as a requirement by the site visit team) is to deliver on our promise of technology transfer to the first responder community.
Consolidating our research requires us to significantly think through the following:
- Strategic research planning
- How should we consolidate our research into a few topics that have a potential of big impact on science and/or first responders?
- Which system artifacts should we pursue through which we can make a big impact into the response organizations?
- How do we sustain the collaborations that we have identified?
- What role RESCUE staff can play in helping with the above tasks?
- Specifically which staff responsibilities are perceived to be important to ensure that the strategic plan is best implemented?
- Exploiting opportunities to interact with response organizations:
- How do we involve response organizations in our research?
- Should we continue the process of focusing on local organizations and opportunistic involvement or should we now seek a strategic plan to involve city/state/national level organizations. Is our current strategy working well? What needs to be fixed?
- How/when should we attempt to try out some of our technologies in response organizations? Some of our technologies are already being deployed and tested working with our partners (e.g., police) and also in drills. However, the level of activity needs significant improvement. Specifically, we are yet to have a clear plan on how some of the major RESCUE artifacts/research gets tested in these environments.
- What led to success for people such as HC Chen and others?
- Are any of our first responder connections tight enough to ensure that we will be able to deploy some technology? Achieving the level of collaboration required needs significant amount of time and trust commitments from both sides. Do such partnerships exist or need to be created. How we nurture such relationships.
- Do we require any special skills to validate the efficacy of our technologies in deployment settings?
- What role can staff play to sustain these activities?
proposed structural changes
The structural changes suggested below are geared towards
- Focusing RESCUE research towards a few consolidated high impact efforts.
- Achieving a tighter connection with response organizations and industry
Specifically, we intend to form two steering committees listed below.
- Steering Committee (External Interactions)
- Steering Committee (Technology & Artifacts)
The roles of these committees (listed below) are interdependent and complementary.
To ensure the synergy between the two, the committees will have multiple members in common. Moreover, the committees will convene together on the same day and will have common sessions at both the beginning and the end of the day.