• Project Summary
• Features
• Research
• Deployments & Demos
• Contact Information

RESCUE Research Connections

The Disaster Portal incorporates features and enhancements based on several RESCUE research projects, and additional research elements will continue to be incorporated as they mature. These include:

Crisis Alert / RAPID - The Crisis Alert dissemination system can automatically create customized notification messages for a set of recipients who may be affected by a disaster or emergency situation based on administrator defined rules. These messages can be delivered via a variety of modalities including email, text messaging, and the RAPID peer-to-peer system also developed by RESCUE. The Crisis Alert system is utilized in the Disaster Portal for broadcasting messages such as press notifications and announcements.

Family Reunification - One planned addition to the Disaster Portal family reunification application is the ability to provide integration of crawling and/or searching of other missing person information sources on the web so that the user can effectively search many sites at once. This and related improvements will utilize results of ongoing research into issues such as crawling, information extraction, data uncertainty, data lineage, approximate query processingon text, and management of structured and unstructured data using the same infrastructure.

P2P Web Server - Flashback is an experimental web server which creates and utilizes a peer-to-peer infrastructure to address the problem of flash crowds overloading a traditional web server. Flashback is being integrated into the Disaster Portal to allow it to be deployed on typical web server hardware yet still remain effective during high-demand periods as might be expected during a disaster.

Traffic / Population Prediction - This project utilizes activity modeling in conjunction with live roadway loop sensor data from CalTrans to provide information on current traffic patterns as well as predictions of near future conditions. A demo covering a limited geographical area was completed. Current efforts are being made to extend these models to track movements of populations in a given area.

Additionally, other RESCUE research in areas such as text extraction, web information disambiguation, multi-dimentional document analysis, faceted web search, and scalable publish-subscribe may be incorporated into future Disaster Portal systems.