Sunshine-less State

Image Credit: NASA/MODIS Rapid Response. As this view from space shows, the recent wildfires in Southern California were anything but localized; they were a national call for new solutions.

It didn’t take long for the recent wildfires in Southern California to spread from a local problem to a state and national crisis. President Bush issued an emergency declaration for seven counties, while the Red Cross, the National Guard, and the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and the Interior were called to the scene. There was no role for the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate, right? Research and innovation for tomorrow can’t possibly put out the fires of today, right?

Perhaps. But fresh ideas and new ways of thinking can help to save lives and minimize damages down the road, if this kind of emergency ever happens again. The S&T Directorate is therefore canvassing the Federal research community, especially the DHS and National Laboratories, in search of potential solutions.

In an October 23 letter, Jay Cohen, DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology, asked the directors of several major labs to search for any technologies or capabilities that could aid firefighters and minimize the dangerous effects of wildfires. “[We] would like to expedite the utilization of applicable off-the-shelf technologies,” said Cohen, who proposed a “rapid response task force” on the issue. He said that expertise at the labs, combined with coordinated research programs and projects, could lead to technologies for preventing wildfires, protecting people and the environment from wildfires, suppressing and predicting the spread of wildfires, and supporting the first responders.

At Snapshots deadline (email press time?), scientists, engineers, and other researchers from the labs were preparing for a combined video teleconference with Directorate leaders. The plan: to bring lab minds and resources together to tackle the wildfire challenge, in a jiffy. The effort is now called Project SAFE (Secure Against Fires and Embers).

There’s already a precedent for this kind of collaboration. In August 2006, when a terrorist plot was uncovered in London to blow up transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives, the S&T Directorate called on the labs—literally. A similar conference call was held and a rapid response team was formed. This effort contributed to the quick adoption of the 3-1-1 Rule for liquids on planes and paved the way for some promising technologies for explosives screening (see the July 2007 issue of S&T Snapshots).

Clearly, where there’s a will—and a team effort—there’s a way.

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Better Than New Tricks

Dogs are already experts at sniffing out all kinds of hidden threats, from contraband to concealed explosive devices. But now a team of scientists led by the Transportation Security Laboratory (TSL) thinks they can improve on this excellent canine capability.

Canine trainers and technology experts have joined together at TSL in New Jersey—a lab of the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate—to enhance the invaluable skills of trained dogs by partnering them with technology. The idea is that a canine can be sent, off-leash, into an environment where a disaster has just occurred, and send back a suite of critical information to its handler and the first responders on the scene.

Has TSL taught dogs how to speak English and use cell phones? Well, not quite … but the scientists have trained a prototype pooch to venture into an underground mass transit environment carrying a multi-sensor guidance and tracking system embedded in a harness and vest, along with his wonderful nose! Major (shown here) has learned how to work with this system, which includes physiological, detection, and location monitors, in addition to an audio guidance system. The guidance system allows the handler to direct the dog off-lead while sensor feedback data is transmitted to the handler or first responder at a remote location.

The Canine Mass Transit Remote Sensor System project is monitored by Polly Gongwer at TSL and is supported by the S&T Directorate’s Explosives Division. Major himself is from Auburn University’s esteemed breeding program, and Auburn’s Paul Waggoner is on the sensor system team. Joseph Weiter at Wyle Laboratories is developing the systems approach to providing communications and data linkage for canines and their handlers, using remote commands and remote navigation sensors and commands.

Sniffing out clues, Major tests the handling on the Canine Mass Transit Remote Sensor System.

The vest assembly has been adapted for canine use, and the integrated components currently include a radio, a tone generator, an amplified speaker, a digital transmitter, a video camera, a wiring harness, a battery pack, and a power adapter.

So far, Wyle Labs has successfully identified and tested a remote-sensor guidance and communication system for use in a multilevel subway. In a multilevel or long-distance situation, repeaters will be needed to transmit or receive audio or video signals.

Based on the success of preliminary tests, “Auburn has already started incorporating the communications vest assembly into their canine explosive training protocol,” says Gongwer. In the near future, she says, both physiological and radiation detection sensors will be added to the vest assembly, providing more and newer canine tricks.

The canine and prototype system is now being evaluated with the cooperation of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority in a multilevel subway. Next, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will participate in tests, with the communications being sent remotely to TSL.

As man’s best friend goes high tech, perhaps next year we’ll see a version of doggie Blue Tooth!

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Science on Wheels

Click on the picture to play a video.

Some threats to homeland security are difficult to spot. Deadly gases, for instance, are often impossible to see, and aerosols can be challenging to detect … without technology, that is. Thanks to research and innovation, most chemical releases can now be detected and analyzed in the field quickly and surely.

But America is a big country. Where should chemical defense programs be implemented? Only in and around the major cities? What about the suburbs or job sites in rural places? There would be no time to spare if a chemical attack were suspected. Could state and local agencies rapidly test the air, soil, and buildings for harmful or lethal substances?

And the bigger question: How can the Nation best prepare for chemical releases—from coast to coast?

Enter PHILIS: the Portable High-Throughput Integrated Laboratory Identification System. PHILIS is the bookmobile or Meals on Wheels of homeland security. Developed by the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate, the system comprises a fleet of trucks and trailers. When duty calls, the unassuming vehicles can rush into action as mobile, high-tech laboratories, each staffed by a team of 12 to 15 scientists and engineers.

Each PHILIS mobile vehicle is capable of identifying numerous chemicals, pinpointing each one’s location and concentration and mapping the extent of any contamination. This information would be critical for recovery and cleanup operations, which would follow emergency response and forensic teams to a chemical release (intentional or accidental). Six PHILIS units, built by Battelle Memorial Institute and Environmental Alternatives, Inc., are already in the hands of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—ready to be deployed to different regions. In December, EPA will receive three more units, designed by a corporate team led by Hamilton Sundstrand. These newer versions will include upgraded equipment for chemical analysis.

“If there’s ever an incident, anywhere, EPA will be equipped to respond,” says Donald Bansleben, the S&T Directorate’s program manager for PHILIS. “Once a PHILIS unit arrives, it can be fully operational within two hours.” The newer vehicles, Bansleben says, will be able to prepare, analyze, and report on several hundreds of chemical samples every 24 hours. These can include vapors, liquids, solids, and mixed-state substances that might contain a chemical warfare agent or another toxic chemical, he says. “They can also look for the presence of these chemicals at levels lower than what is immediately dangerous,” he adds.

PHILIS is the first start-to-finish product from the Directorate, originating in the early days of DHS in 2003. It began with a proof-of-concept demonstration and grew into a single prototype after undergoing critical testing and evaluation. The fleet meets all Federal safety standards.

Are there still more PHILIS-like trucks and trailers to come? Perhaps, but if so, they will carry a different set of capabilities. Like detection and analysis technologies, chemical threats are evolving. As prepared as the Nation can be, there will always be new chemicals risks to prepare for.

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Google Meets Sherlock Holmes

In any one day, homeland security and law enforcement agencies might sift through thousands of complex and often contradictory clues about potential terrorist threats. These clues can be buried in a landslide of raw text, recorded messages, surveillance data, and bank records that would fill millions of iPods each day.

But most of these clues are “fuzzy”: The same face (or is it?) appears in three surveillance clips, or someone is snapping up makeshift detonators on the Web. If fuzzy clues follow a pattern, the pattern must be inferred. To thwart another September 11, analysts must meld the encyclopedic eye of Google-age technology with Sherlock Holmes’s inductive genius.

Late last century, Edward Tufte catalogued ways to display data that were either structured (train schedules) or similar (death rates). Today, researchers at the DHS Science and Technology Directorate are creating ways to see fuzzy data as a 3-dimensional picture where threat clues can jump out. The field of visual analytics “takes Tufte’s work to the next generation,” says Dr. Joseph Kielman, Basic Research Lead for the Directorate’s Command, Control and Interoperability Division. Kielman advises the National Visualization and Analytics Center, based at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and its university partners, called the regional centers.

A picture is worth a thousand terabytes: Scatter plots, 2-D shapes, rotatable 3-D clouds, animation—these and other techniques are being explored to help analysts see clues in mountains of “fuzzy” data.

The centers’ interdisciplinary researchers are automating how analysts recognize and rate potential threats. Mathematicians, logicians, and linguists make the collective universe of data assume a meaningful shape. They assign brightness, color, texture, and size to billions of known and apparent facts, and they create rules to integrate these values so threats stand out. For example, a day’s cache of video, cell phone calls, photos, bank records, chat rooms, and intercepted emails may take shape as a blue-gray cloud (picture, lower-right). If terror is afoot in L.A. and Boston, those cities are highlighted on a U.S. map (picture, center).

A month of static views might be animated as a “temporal” movie, where a swelling ridge reveals a growing threat. Analysts can then state, “I think a bomb will explode here.”

“We’re not looking for ‘meaning,’ per se,” Kielman explains, “but for patterns that will let us detect the expected and discover the unexpected.” Neither the researchers nor the analysts, he says, need to understand the terrorists’ language—no small advantage, given the shortage of cleared linguists.

It will be years before visual analytics can automatically puzzle out clues from fuzzy data like video, cautions Kielman: “The pre-9/11 chatter didn’t say, ‘We’re going to plow airplanes into the Twin Towers.’ To correlate these facts, you must get relational,” connecting screen names with bank records, bank records with faces. How researchers will get there remains an unwritten story. But with each chapter, the plot thickens.

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S&T Snapshots is a monthly newsletter produced by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate in partnership with the Homeland Security Institute. HSI is a Studies and Analysis Federally Funded Research and Development Center.