Oringer Seminar -- A Special IST Lunch Bunch Event

This talk describes ongoing work by GPS (geology and planetary sciences), civil engineering, CACR (center for advanced computing research) and computer science at Caltech on community sensor networks for disaster management. The research group includes PhD students, undergraduates, research staff and faculty. This talk looks at questions such as: Can ordinary people, such as school children, deploy sensors to detect shaking from earthquakes? Can a system based on installation and deployment of sensors by self-selected members of the community provide early warning (of a few seconds) of impending shaking? Are sensors in phones useful for disaster management? What sorts of sensors can be used to detect hazardous radiation? Can personal hazard stations in homes and offices be used to sense and respond to disasters such as fires? The talk describes research challenges including design of sensors, methods of exploiting Cloud computing systems, and algorithms for rapid detection of geospatial events. A new initiative by the Computing Community Consortium on disaster management will be described briefly.