October 30, 2015
Two New Projects for CoSSaR
The Center for Collaborative Systems for Security, Safety, and Regional Resilience (CoSSaR) is pleased to announce two recently funded projects. The first, Project Interoperability in Puget Sound (PIPS), is funded by the White House Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment and by the Department of Homeland Security, and the second, brought to CoSSaR by our recently appointed Principal Research Scientist Dr. Scott Miles, is a three-year award from the National Science Foundation to improve the resilience of critical infrastructure. With these new projects, since its recent creation in August 2014, CoSSaR-funded projects have totaled over $5,000,000.
The PIPS project seeks to link interoperability tools and concepts to mission requirements by building on previous work with regional partners to analyze maritime operational information sharing. Professor and CoSSaR Director Mark Haselkorn of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) is leading the $305,000, one-year project. Through PIPS, current interoperability tools and concepts will be refined to better meet user and mission needs, hopefully serving as a model for community-driven interoperability that could also be adapted to other geographic regions.
One set of interoperability tools that PIPS will focus on are known as ICAM (Identity, Credential, and Access Management). Historically systems maintain a local list of users who must apply and receive access to each system independently, along with the required information for controlling access to different types of information. Designers of ICAM tools hope to enhance this service by providing trusted ways of verifying the identity of users and their access to information and services based on, for example, past relationships, mission roles and “need to know.” The PIPS team includes Professor Mark Zachry (HCDE), Dr. Sonia Savelli (UW-APL), Principal Research Scientist Dr. Keith Butler, Research Scientist Brian Zito, and PhD students Melissa Braxton (HCDE), Maura Rowell (Environmental & Civil Engineering), and Chris Little (HCDE).
Newly appointed HCDE Principal Research Scientist Dr. Scott Miles is principal investigator for a recently awarded National Science Foundation grant awarded through the Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes solicitation. The project titled “Simulation-Based Hypothesis Testing of Socio-Technical Community Resilience Using Distributed Optimization and Natural Language Processing” is a collaborative award with Rice University totaling $1.7 million over four years. The project includes two other University of Washington researchers: Professor Mehran Mesbahi (Aeronautics and Astronautics) and Associate Professor Noah Smith (Computer Science and Engineering).
Three primary goals of the research are to (1) systematically rethink critical infrastructure as a web of social and technical systems, (2) build computer simulation models to explore critical infrastructure performance after major and minor disruptions, and (3) test hypotheses to appreciate how critical infrastructure can improve resilience and support the diverse needs of communities. Qualitative data about past critical infrastructure disruptions and disasters will be compiled from text sources, such as social media, new stories, government documents, and industry reports. The text data will be analyzed using new natural language processing methods to identify key variables describing critical infrastructure and community resilience, as well as the relationships between them. Quantitative data describing similar variables will be collected from secondary sources, as well as from experts using customized survey techniques. Data analysis results will be synthesized to design computational models that simulate the many events, resource exchanges, and decisions that occur across multiple geographic scales after critical infrastructure disruptions and disasters. Techniques will be devised to integrate and optimize the constructed computer models. This will permit efficient testing of hypotheses about the relationships between critical infrastructure performance and community resilience.
This project aims to improve the design and management of critical infrastructure to build resilience in the face of minor disruptions and large disasters. In addition, the project will produce a better understanding of the social and technical links between different types of critical infrastructure, and provide deeper insight into the influence of social forces on critical infrastructure and the roles of critical infrastructure in promoting a community’s identity and well-being.