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.
(CLEAR) project funded through the NSF RAPID program is a cross-platform configurable data collection system intended to allow rapid development of smartphone data collection applications without requiring a need for computer expertise. This NSF-funded project is a collaborative research effort between Virginia Tech, the University of Alabama, and Vanderbilt University. Prof. Jules White is the PI at Virginia Tech, Prof. Jeff Gray is the PI at the University of Alabama, and Prof. Douglas Schmidt is the PI at Vanderbilt University. The collaborative effort is investigating techniques that apply smartphones to build citizen scientist data collection systems for disaster areas and other problems of societal importance. At Vanderbilt, we focused our efforts on leveraging the results of the CLEAR effort towards graduate education by addressing problems in the domain of vehicular traffic and applications used by soldiers defending national security. In our systems, information collected via smartphones is collected and streamed to a compute cloud environment for processing. This approach has yielded new insights into the usefulness of smartphones, in particular how a cluster of smartphones could be useful in search and rescue operations. We also obtained new insights in battery life of smartphones, and how best to schedule the search and rescue tasks on these phones to increase the longevity of the mission. Undergraduate education in the form of summer internship focused on addressing challenges with scalable and real-time dissemination of hazardous weather alerts. A software engineering graduate-level course offered involved smartphone-related software engineering discussions and presentations. A new software design patterns course using Android-based smartphones will be offered in Fall 2012 based on the insights gleaned from our NSF project. As future work, we are enhancing our research findings and investigating the design and management of mobile cloud platforms. We are leveraging the resources we have put together using a recent DURIP equipment award that enabled us to set up a mobile computing cloud infrastructure. The new platform that we are building will allow researchers to run 1,000+ virtualized Android emulators and control them using a combination of our simulation frameworks and customizable agents. This new platform will allow researchers to experiment with real applications in the loop and expand simulation capabilities to analyze complex scenarios, such as the spread of malware in a disaster area.
