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Managing Data for Disaster Relief

Ashok Agrawala, Louiqa Raschid, Amol Deshpande, and Dana Nau

The inability of searchers to communicate at the World Trade Center in 2001 and the chaos on the ground after Hurricane Katrina highlighted the need for good ways to share information during and after disasters.

Six weeks after 9/11, Ashok Agrawala—using his expertise in wireless communication and location detection—put together Draco, a rapidly deployable system for helping emergency personnel communicate.

Agrawala’s system allows members of search teams to communicate with each other and with a central commander and to leave virtual tags about problems like broken bones or structural damage.

“The situation was nothing short of chaotic on 9/11. Since then, a lot of people have been developing individual technologies” says Agrawala. His system offers a complete communication package that can be deployed rapidly and is particularly good at tracking individuals’ locations using time-of-flight wireless signals, whether people are indoors or outdoors.

This kind of communication system is valuable not only in disasters but in law enforcement. Agrawala is working with University of Maryland police to test some technologies. He is also working with the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program to develop an information brokering system to expedite communication among different law enforcement agencies. Dick Baer, who works for the Washington-Baltimore HIDTA says, “Ashok’s work has been very effective in achieving integration. He is able to take existing capabilities and put it all together.”

UMIACS researcher Louiqa Raschid, who specializes in integrating information from various sources, was the principal database architect for Sahana, open-source software for disaster management that is now used around the world. “Disaster relief isn’t done by one company solving a problem,” says Raschid, “Information systems tend to fail because of the difficulty of sharing information among all the organizations that are involved.”

Sahana helps match resources with those who need them by bringing together data about victims, volunteers, organizers, emergency requests, and shelters. Because Sahana is opensource, people in different regions can tailor the program to their needs and can integrate Sahana with the software they are already using.

Versions of Sahana have been used in the United States, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Among its diverse capabilities, the software can send out alerts to large numbers of people. For example, after a recent earthquake, people in Sri Lanka received text messages warning them of possible tsunamis. In 2007, Sahana received the Free Software Foundation’s award for Social Benefit.

“Louiqa is very passionate about using information technology to help solve humanitarian problems,” says Kristina Lerman, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, who recently wrote a research proposal with Raschid. “Sahana is being used by New York City. FEMA is considering it. It is quite exciting, and Sahana developers are not profiting from it.”

Another researcher in UMIACS, Amol Deshpande works on methods to manage data generated by tiny, wireless sensors using statistical modeling. Whether sensors are deployed for intense, short-term use such as monitoring a wildfire or for long-term, preventative tasks, such as observing a bridge, being able to obtain data in an energy-efficient way makes sensors much more usable, and Deshpande also works to create energy efficient algorithms for sensor networks.

Deshpande’s methods need to cope with the abundant but noisy and incomplete data continuously generated by sensors and must be able to detect anomalies in real time. “Our goal is to make the analysis faster and more efficient,” says Deshpande.

One of Dana Nau’s main research interests is how to generate plans. David Aha, a computer scientist at the Naval Research Lab, says, “Dana is one of the preeminent people in the world of artificial intelligence planning.” In collaboration with Aha, Nau helped develop methods for planning evacuations of noncombatants in emergencies, creating a system that Nau describes as “a sort of intelligent bookkeeper.”

“At certain points, you could ask the system to use our SHO P software to do some of the planning for you,” says Nau. SHOP, for Simple Hierarchical Ordered Planner, can generate plans for tasks in many different kinds of problem domains, provided that a user gives it information about how to do so.

SHO P and its successor SHO P2 are open-source software and have been used in hundreds of projects by government, industry, and academia. A company in Minneapolis called SIFT, for Smart Information Flow Technologies, has adapted SHO P2 to create plans for running unmanned aerial vehicles. A user can enter plain-language instructions for the vehicles, which the program decomposes into computer commands. Robert Goldman, a senior scientist at SIFT, says. “One of the most appealing things about the SHO P system is that it’s adaptable. It doesn’t rely on a very rigid problem structure. To do that, you have to be open to the complicated and messy aspects of real problems.”

Better Systems Software

Jeff Foster and Michael Hicks

Jeff Foster and Michael Hicks are developing ways to help programmers write better systems software—software that is more secure, reliable, and able to run without crashing or needing to be restarted.

Systems software—like the code running workplace servers or Internet shopping sites—must handle many activities in tandem, manage resources like memory and processing power efficiently, and provide ready access to information while also protecting data from unwanted access and tampering. www.umiacs.umd.edu

Hicks and Foster are working to design software that can do all this and also run for years without crashing or needing to be restarted.

Foster and Hicks joined UMIACS within months of each other, both having worked previously on analyzing code for security problems. They continued that work at UMIACS and started collaborating soon after they arrived. In late 2006, they formally merged their research groups. “About half of our students are officially co-advised,” says Hicks, “and the other half are unofficially co-advised.” Everyone in the group meets frequently to go over their projects and problems.

Their research is both formal and mathematical as well as experimental and practical, the two researchers say. “We build programs that relate to existing software today so that we know that the work that we’re doing formally and theoretically will also have practical benefits,” says Foster. One of the problems Hicks and Foster have undertaken is how to update software while it continues to run. For example, an online service or a personal computer could have bugs corrected or get software updates without having to be shut down and restarted. The researchers have designed a flexible and safe system for converting source code into a version that can continue to operate while it is altered. On test runs, Foster and Hicks have shown that common applications, like secure shell servers, FTP servers, or routers could be altered to run the most up-to-date code without having to be shut down at all for three years or more.

“What’s very impressive is that the work is based on very strong theory,” comments Tom Ball of Microsoft Research, “and they took it all the way to robust implementation.” Another example of a tool that Foster and Hicks have built is a program they call Locksmith. For decades, computers became faster and faster as, true to Moore’s law, hardware developers packed ever more transistors into computer processors. But in recent years, the speed of individual processors has plateaued as they have reached the physical limits for transistor density. Packing more transistors together makes processors run too hot and use too much power. As a solution, computers are being made with two processors instead of just one.

“Very soon, we will have computers with hundreds of processors and then thousands,” says Hicks. The use of parallel processors fundamentally changes how programmers have to write code, say Hicks and Foster. Software run on parallel processors must be able to integrate calculations that happen separately and make sure that information is transferred between—or among—processors in the proper order. When information isn’t processed in the right order, “data races” can cause catastrophic system failures. Indeed, the August 2003 electric blackout in the Northeast United States resulted from a data race in a power plant’s management software.

Locksmith can analyze software to ensure that it uses proper synchronization techniques for avoiding data races. This reduces the burden on programmers who are writing for parallel processors since mistakes in synchronization can be caught automatically. Because Locksmith is open-source software, other researchers and developers can freely download, use, and even extend Locksmith.

Another tool that Hicks and Foster have developed, which they call Pistachio, is a method for testing communication protocols among computers to ensure that the protocols are reliable and secure. “There’s always a gap between the code that you actually write and the idealized version of it on paper,” says Foster. “The idea is to take English language descriptions of what code is designed to do and translate that into Pistachio’s specification language. Then you can run Pistachio to check whether the specifications and the code match.” Pistachio runs very quickly and has been used to check several implementations of SSH2, a widely-used protocol for securely communicating between computers, such as between a home computer and an office network.

“Our interest started as technical, but we also want to have an impact,” says Hicks about their programs. To increase the usefulness of their tools, he and Foster are working with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at UMIACS to see how adapting their programs’ interfaces could make their tools more accessible and effective. Microsoft’s Ball commends the way Hicks and Foster use real data to show that their techniques work. “They have quite a strong track record,” he says.

Networks and Links

Lise Getoor

Sometimes the best way to understand something is to see how it relates to others. Lise Getoor, an assistant professor of computer science and member of UMIACS, specializes in studying networks or how entities—whether people, events, research projects, or points on a map—are connected to each other. She examines how these connections can be used for machine learning and probabilistic reasoning.

“Traditionally, people have looked more at individuals instead of the links among them,” says Getoor. “We can label individuals based not only on their attributes but on what they’re connected to.” In other words, Getoor studies relationships. The work of “link mining” to extract information can be looked at in an abstract, mathematical way as well as in very practical terms. Getoor has developed algorithms for classifying all manner of data.

Exploring links in an academic context, she has analyzed how research publications are connected to each other through their authors and citations. From such bibliographic data, one can identify collaborative groups—one type of social group. Going a step further, Getoor has looked at how social relationships among academics, deduced from evidence such as how professors are grouped in committees organizing a conference, affect individuals’ social capital—and, in turn, publication rates. The same kind of analysis can be used to explore relationships between lawmakers and lobbyists, she says.

In another sort of link mining, collaborating with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Getoor has looked at the hyperlinks among the Web sites of professors and students. It turns out that one strong sign that a Web site belongs to a professor is that it does not include links to the Web sites of other professors! This is just one example of how one can deduce the roles of individuals by looking at the types of interactions they have. In another example, Getoor has analyzed how e-mail history reveals people’s roles in a company as well as the professional and social groups to which they belong.

In addition to link mining, one of Getoor’s main interests is entity resolution, or developing tools to deduce whether two separate mentions of a person, place, object, or event refer in fact to the same thing. For example, are references to a Joe Smith and another to a Joseph Smith talking about the same person? Entity resolution is also important in geography, and Getoor is collaborating with the U.S. government’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to go through databases of locations and peg which mentions are redundant, referring to the same underlying place. For example, the agency receives updates from local governments and needs to distinguish whether new information refers to a place meriting a new entry or refers to an entity that already exists in the database, if under a slightly different name or mismatched coordinates. “It’s common for names or coordinates to be off,” notes Getoor.

Whether dealing with people or geographical locations, entity resolution requires algorithms that assess the commonalities and distinctions between two records. Clearly, if two entities’ attributes and relationships do not overlap extensively, they are more likely to be distinct rather than duplicates.

Getoor speaks about concrete problems but also about the abstract essence of those problems. “I do like the theory and algorithms as well as the compelling applications,” she says. At the level of theory, she talks about statistical relational learning and link mining driving machine learning, artificial intelligence, and reasoning under uncertainty. At the level of applications, she talks about entity resolution, group discovery, and role discovery.

“Lise has a unique way of breaking down problems and teasing out the essence of a question,” says Chris Diehl, a senior research scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory who has collaborated with Getoor.

For her research, Getoor receives funding from the National Science Foundation as well as a consortium of intelligence agencies. “I’m also interested in how all this relates to privacy and what you can say about the privacy you can guarantee,” she says. In some cases, such as with health or financial records, the goal is to guarantee that no one can know that two records refer to the same person. In other cases, distinguishing entities can be helpful—for example, to thwart financial identity theft. In early 2007, Getoor received a Google Research Award for her work on entity resolution.

Ultimately, Getoor’s work revolves around graph identification—or taking noisy, redundant data and identifying the true underlying network of nodes and links. Getoor works to distinguish, label, and rank nodes by better assessing, categorizing, and inferring the links among them, at the same time always asking exactly how much and what kind of data is necessary to get accurate and reliable analysis.

Biology

Extended Page for Research Area.

Canna scallion leaves swiss chard, spring onion. Ceylon spinach scallion courgette water chestnut kale runner bean, spinach endive, yardlong bean. Endive; chinese artichoke courgette, kohlrabi catsear kale ulluco scallion cucumber.

Avocado fiddlehead arracacha moth bean, peanut garden rocket? Ginger radicchio chicory tarwi zucchini, bitterleaf garden rocket. Wild leek yam; burdock, summer purslane winged bean pea; beetroot samphire.

Celeriac yam mizuna greens kurrat. Polk yam; chinese cabbage, samphire tarwi, samphire lentil broadleaf arrowhead. Kai-lan broccoli rabe napa cabbage good king henry leek chinese cabbage, black-eyed pea. Sweet Potato or Kumara new zealand spinach dandelion.

Broccoli Rabe fluted pumpkin tatsoi; yarrow lizard's tail, asparagus mustard cassava cress black-eyed pea. Florence fennel green bean winter purslane.

Azuki bean, sweet potato or kumara epazote lamb's lettuce elephant garlic wild leek. Ginger, scorzonera. Garden Rocket fluted pumpkin soybean cress paracress, catsear. Pak choy garbanzo shallot ti. Hamburg parsley; parsnip yam guar brussels sprout scallion fava bean arracacha greater plantain manioc skirret canna. Swede; ulluco, plectranthus jerusalem artichoke pea sprouts turnip greens wild leek, mooli fluted pumpkin.

Site Manual

Upcoming Events

UMIACS Co-Sponsors UMD/NIST Symposium A joint symposium between the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is scheduled for Friday, Jan. 24 from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. in 2117 of the Computer Science Instructional Center. The daylong conference is designed to bring together researchers that approach network science from the perspectives of different fields. Registration for the event is closed but if you would still like to attend please contact Michelle Girvan at girvan@umd.edu. The symposium’s sponsors include UMIACS, the UMD Department of Physics and NIST.

Past events

University of Maryland Partnership with the LTS (2004-2005)

The University of Maryland, through UMIACS, has established a partnership with the Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences (LTS) based on collaborative research programs covering a broad spectrum of fundamental and applied research in the design, performance, and the management of distributed heterogeneous networks. In addition, this partnership involves strong outreach activities including collaboration with industrial partners and the organization of focused workshops and seminar series in emerging technology areas in telecommunications sciences. The UMD Principal Investigator is Prof. Joseph JaJa (UMIACS and ECE) with faculty participating from the following units: UMIACS, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of Computer Science, the Business School, Institute for Systems Research, and the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at UMBC.

Spring 2005: Progress Review Presentations

January 2005: Progress Report

October 2004: Progress Report

June 2004: UMIACS/LTS Annual Review Presentations

January 2004: Progress Report

LTS/UMIACS Projects and Faculty Involved:

UMIACS/LTS Seminar Series (2004):

Read Progress Reports and Presentations from Past Projects between 1999 and 2003

University of Maryland Partnership with the LTS (1999-2003)

The University of Maryland, through UMIACS, has established a partnership with the Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences (LTS) based on collaborative research programs covering a broad spectrum of fundamental and applied research in the design, performance, and the management of distributed heterogeneous networks. In addition, this partnership involves strong outreach activities including collaboration with industrial partners and the organization of focused workshops and seminar series in emerging technology areas in telecommunications sciences. The UMD Principal Investigator is Prof. Joseph JaJa (UMIACS and ECE) with faculty participating from the following units: UMIACS, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of Computer Science, the Business School, Institute for Systems Research, and the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at UMBC.

UMIACS/LTS Annual Review Presentation 2003:

UMIACS/LTS Seminar Series (Spring 2003):

  • Combining Network Economics and Engineering Over Several Scales (Powerpoint); February 20; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • Economic Aspects of Information Security (PDF); March 6; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • The Telecom Business and its Uncertain Future (PDF); March 13; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 1112 A.V. Williams
  • Faith and Hope: Methodologies for Building Trusted Systems (PDF); April 3; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • CODEX: An Application of Distributed Trust (PDF); April 17; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • An Architecture for the Security Auditing in Converged Networks (PDF); May 1; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 1112 A.V. Williams
  • The Business Case for Internet Pricing and Benefits to Network Security (PDF); May 15; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 1112 A.V. Williams
  • Resilient Multicast Using Overlays (PDF); October 15; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • Randomized Algorithms for Network Security and Peer-to-Peer Systems (PDF); November 5; 3 p.m. - 4 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • Structured Peer-To-Peer Overlay Networks: A New Foundation For Distributed Applications? (PDF); November 10; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • New Tools in Applied Cryptography; December 10; 3 p.m. - 4 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams

UMIACS/LTS Seminar Series (Fall 2002):

  • Dynamic Traffic Engineering in IP and Optical Networks (PDF); September 26; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • Agent Technology for Network Management (PDF); October 10; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • Approaches for IP Traffic Engineering; Thursday, October 24; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • IP Network Operations and Management; Thursday, November 7; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • An Empirical Analysis of Network Externalities in P2P Music-Sharing Networks; Thursday, November 21; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams

Telcordia/LTS Seminar Series (Spring 2002):

  • Elements of IP Network Design (PowerPoint, PDF); Feb 11, 2002; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2120 A.V. Williams
  • Multiprotocol Label Switching: Overview & Applications (PowerPoint, PDF); Feb 25, 2002; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • IP and Optical: Better Together? (PowerPoint, PDF); Mar 11, 2002; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • Gigabit Ethernet: Is it a Disruptive Technology? (PowerPoint, PDF); Apr 1, 2002; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • Voice Over IP: Architectures, Applications and Challenges (PowerPoint, PDF); Apr 15, 2002; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • Wireless Data (PDF File, 922KB); May 6, 2002; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams
  • Internet Security - Stakeholders, Issues, and Examples (PDF File, 1.78MB); May 13, 2002; 2 p.m. - 3 p.m.; 2460 A.V. Williams

Previous Projects (2001-02):

Previous Projects (1999-2000):

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