This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project is developing technology for ubiquitous event reporting and data gathering on the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and its ecological impacts. Traditional applications for monitoring disasters have relied on specialized, tightly-coupled, and expensive hardware and software platforms to capture, aggregate, and disseminate information on affected areas. We lack science and technology for rapid and dependable integration of computing and communication technology into natural and engineered physical systems, cyber-physical systems (CPS). The tragic Gulf oil spill of 2010 presents both a compelling need to fill this gap in research and a critical opportunity to help in relief efforts by deploying cutting-edge CPS research in the field. In particular, this CPS research is developing a cloud-supported mobile CPS application enabling community members to contribute as citizen scientists through sensor deployments and direct recording of events and ecological impacts of the Gulf oil spill, such as fish and bird kills.
The project exploits the availability of smartphones (with sophisticated sensor packages, high-level programming APIs, and multiple network connectivity options) and cloud computing infrastructures that enable collecting and aggregating data from mobile applications. The goal is to develop a scientific basis for managing the quality-of-service (QoS), user coordination, sensor data dissemination, and validation issues that arise in mobile CPS disaster monitoring applications.
The research will have many important broader impacts related to the Gulf oil spill disaster relief efforts, including providing help for the affected Gulf communities as they field and evaluate next-generation CPS research and build a sustained capability for capturing large snapshots of the ecological impact of the Gulf oil spill. The resulting environmental data will have lasting value for evaluating the consequences of the spill in multiple research fields, but especially in Marine Biology. The project is collaborating with Gulf area K-12 schools to integrate disaster and ecology monitoring activities into their curricula. The technologies developed (resource optimization techniques, data reporting protocol trade-off analysis, and empirical evaluation of social network coordination strategies for an open data environment) will provide a resource for the CPS research community. It is expected that project results will enable future efforts to create and validate CPS disaster response systems that can scale to hundreds of thousands of users and operate effectively in life-critical situations with scarce network and computing resources.
Mobile phone applications are emerging as a low-cost and rapid approach for organizing disaster recovery teams and collecting information about conditions in disaster areas from citizen scientists. With the advancement of smartphones, practical solutions to aid in disaster relief can be rapidly created to provide critical services, such as damage recording/reporting, information sharing, and response team organization at a fraction of the cost of traditional proprietary solutions. Moreover, the most recent advances in cloud computing can provide the large-scale data storage, fault tolerance, and scalability to support large-scale data collection from citizen scientist smartphones so that they can provide competitive reliability and much greater flexibility than proprietary solutions. The outcomes of this project provide a number of key elements for rapidly fielding effective and safe citizen scientist smartphone disaster response systems. The key outcomes include: 1) a large-scale testing environment, built on top of the Virginia Tech ATTACK Cloud, for experimenting with disaster collection systems on 1,000s of Android devices; 2) simulation techniques for validating the efficacy of smartphone data collection approaches; and 3) algorithms for anonymizing data collected from citizen scientist smartphones to ensure privacy. These outcomes allow early and large-scale validation of smartphone disaster systems before they are fielded to ensure not only safety but also end-user privacy.
