CCICADA - Command, Control, and Interoperability
Center for Advanced Data Analysis
Recent Center News:
- CCICADA Welcomes Four New Partner Institutions:
The City College of New York; Regal Decision Systems; Telcordia Technologies; and University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) have been added as CCICADA partners, bringing the total number of CCICADA partners to 17. - Flood Mitigation on the Raritan River: A FEMA Region II Project at CCICADA and the NTSCOE.
An overwhelming majority of the emergency response efforts addressed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency involve flood related issues. Therefore, understanding flood risk and the possible risk mitigation strategies that can be implemented are of great importance to FEMA in meeting its mission responsibilities. In seeking information and assistance in this regard, FEMA has awarded $158,000 to two DHS University Centers of Excellence (COEs), the Command, Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA) and the National Transportation Security COE (NTSCOE) for a project on Flood Mitigation on the Raritan River, the river running by Rutgers University. The project also has additional involvement from a third COE, the Center for Risk and Economic Analyses of Terrorism Events (CREATE). The project is based at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers.
For complete article see here - CCICADA Gets Grant from NJ Dept. of Health and Senior Services to Port
its Health Emergency Situational Awareness System Hippocrates to Smart
Phones.
New Jersey's response to the anthrax scare of 2001 developed into Hippocrates, a web-based situational awareness tool shared by the state's public health community and developed by the NJ Department of Health and Senior Services (NJ DHSS). Although Hippocrates includes features such as automated e-mail messaging,
GIS is the heart of it. Hippocrates fuses fixed geographic data elements with dynamic data that brings maps to life. Health-specific layers include the locations of long-term care facilities and a module for mapping chemical facilities. Users can also see real-time displays of weather and traffic and the movements of ambulances via Global Positioning System devices mounted on the vehicles. Because Hippocrates is web-based it is easy to connect all components of the state's health system and its partners in the state emergency operations center and at the federal level.
CCICADA has received a contract for $250K from NJ DHSS to develop Smart Phone Applications to connect to their Hippocrates system. The specific project is to develop a smart phone interface to the Incident Command function of their on-line Hippocrates system. In particular, CCICADA will produce iOS and Android based applications that will let operators in the field create and update reports with Hippocrates in a secure manner, making Hippocrates more broadly applicable. Testing of these applications will be carried out by EMS personnel associated with the Robert Wood Johnson University hospital under a subcontract from CCICADA. - "Hat Chase" on the Rutgers Campus Tests Use of Social Media for Alerts and Warnings.
It was the middle of spring, there were flowers all round, and you witnessed an array of unique and unusual hats throughout the day. An Easter parade perhaps? A midieval festival? A royal wedding? If it was May 2 or 3 on the Rutgers University campus, it was the Hat Chase, an unusual student competition staged to inform CCICADA researchers about the potential utility of social media as a means for detecting and disseminating information about urgent events on campuses.
For complete article see here - REU Students Arrive at CCICADA
Fifty undergraduates from around the US (and the Czech Republic) descended upon CCICADA's home at the DIMACS Center at Rutgers University on May 31. Many will work at CCICADA's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, working on homeland security research one on one with a mentor, on such problems as detection of anomalies in communication networks, container inspection at ports, game-theoretic aspects of homeland security, and entity resolution in law enforcement applications. REU - CCICADA Sponsors Workshop on Risk Averse Algorithmic Decision Making
Properly assessing riskiness of available options is central to homeland security decision making under uncertainty. Measures of risk are often important in the context of solving dynamic optimization problems. A CCICADA workshop held May 9-11, 2011 concentrated on recent work developing alternative measures and their properties, especially in the context of dynamic optimization. Since a risk measure has to be efficiently computed to be useful, there is a need to develop efficient algorithms that address dynamic risk measures in both the objective function and the constraints. This calls for new methods of algorithmic decision theory. It also calls for new methods for modeling constraints in a dynamic setting in a practically useful manner and for ways to understand the interplay among risk measures, problem formulation, and computational tractability. These were among the themes of this highly successful workshop. Workshop on Risk Averse Algorithmic Decision Making - CCICADA DHS Fellow Emilie Hogan
Finishes Her PhD and Heads off to PNNL
Emilie Hogan was the recipient of the first DHS Career Development Fellowship granted by our predecessor DHS center, the Center for Dynamic Data Analysis (DyDAn). Hogan continued her fellowship under the auspices of CCICADA, successfully defended her PhD dissertation entitled "Experimental Mathematics Applied to the Study of Non-linear Recurrences" on April 7, 2011, and received her PhD on May 15, 2011. In August 2011, Hogan will join the Computational Mathematics group within the Fundamental and Computational Sciences Directorate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as a Post Doctorate Research Assistant. As part of Hogan's fellowship, DyDAn introduced her to Dr. Cliff Joslyn, a Chief Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory who served as mentor for her required summer internship and who will continue to mentor her as she begins her employment as a postdoctoral researcher at PNNL later this year.
For complete article see here - CCICADA Centerwide Spring Retreat a Great Success
The third CCICADA centerwide retreat brought together 40 graduate students and researchers from the many CCICADA partner institutions to listen to presentations, view posters, and exchange ideas about collaborations in research. The retreat, held at CCICADA partner Morgan State University April 1-2, 2011, featured a dinner talk by Mike Roosa,
CIO of the Maryland State Police, that kept the audience asking questions for an extra hour until the banquet room
at our hotel closed.
Some of the CCICADA students/faculty at Morgan
State Retreat, April 2, 2011.
CCICADA's Nina Fefferman lecturing at Morgan
State Retreat, April 2, 2011. - CCICADA Researchers at ISI Apply Social Media Methods to Problems of Human Trafficking (Slavery and Child Prostitution).
CCICADA Researcher Eduard Hovy and colleagues at ISI/USC have been investigating the use of Twitter messages ("tweets": short 140-character messages). Tweets are produced by people around the world all the time, and can be viewed as informal, distributed "sensor readings". Particularly in crisis situations, where disenfranchised people might not think to contact the authorities, tweets can serve as a valuable additional source of very local and up-to-date information. Hovy and colleagues have developed a variety of techniques to detect when events of interest occur around the world (for their experiments they have selected 50 event types, including earthquakes, fires, announcements of movie star events, political events of various kinds, etc.). They have investigated methods of grouping event tweets by time periods and observing the evolution of an event through its typical stages. Since their software can be tuned to recognize any kind of event (as long as enough people tweet about it), they anticipate making this available for a wide variety of uses. The overall focus of this task is the integration of data from disparate sources. Hovy has begun to work with the FBI, Long Beach, CA Police Department, and DHS agents to apply these methods to information about human trafficking (slavery and child prostitution). - Data Science Summer Institute Welcomes Students to CCICADA
Partner UIUC.
The Data Sciences Summer Institute (DSSI) is a 6-week long program in Data Science areas held at CCICADA partner UIUC. The 2011 DSSI welcomed students from around the country on May 22, 2011. This summer program consists of an intensive class in the mathematical foundations of Data Sciences, tutorials on advanced Data Science topics, expert speakers, and collaborative research projects. 2011 Data Sciences Summer Institute