From the Ground Up

We all know the dedication of the country’s first-responder community—the hundreds of thousands of selfless men and women who rush to emergency scenes every minute of every day, charging into crumbling buildings enshrouded in flames, saving lives and property. When the alarm sounds, they act, carrying all manner of equipment and gear—some of it good, some of it tailor-made to their needs, some of it less so, and some they perhaps wish they could redesign themselves.

This firefighter clearly cannot get through the framing studs of this house with his traditional breathing tank on his back … … but the new low-profile SCBA, developed through a TechSolutions suggestion, allows this firefighter much greater mobility.

So, a program from the DHS Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate that not only allows first responders to communicate their needs and ideas directly to DHS, but also includes them in the testing and evaluation of all that gear, is valuable not only to first responders, but to the people they help every day.

Aimed at first responders, an outreach program called Responder Technologies (R-Tech) was developed for one reason: to find solutions and put them into the hands of America’s heroes—including fire, emergency medical service, law enforcement, explosives ordnance, hazmat, and search-and-rescue workers.

R-Tech does this in two ways: first, it rapidly distributes information on first-responder products and services through a Central Federal Technology Clearinghouse, issuing announcements for innovative solutions and providing guidance to help responders evaluate and purchase technologies.

Second, R-Tech will soon launch an interactive Web page, at www.firstresponder.gov, where first responders will be free to voice their needs and ideas directly to the DHS S&T Directorate for action—unfiltered by any middlemen—as part of an initiative called TechSolutions. The goal of this initiative is to identify and prototype only those technologies actually needed by this vital community—technologies that will deliver a solution to first responders in less than 12 months.

For example, the responder community has told TechSolutions that firefighters desperately need a small, lightweight breathing device that they can wear in hazardous or smoke-filled situations. The device can’t encumber the firefighters or add to the 50-plus pounds of gear they often carry.

“One of the biggest problems we have is the risk of entanglement of our air tanks,” said Randy Griffin, a firefighter from DeWitt, N.Y., who also serves as a first responder liaison at the S&T Directorate. “As we make our way through small openings, and over debris and obstructions, we can get snagged, trapped, or possibly killed.”

So, the S&T Directorate is helping to develop an innovative self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) that will allow emergency responders more mobility, as well as more accessibility to confined spaces. The weight has been pared from 30 pounds to 8 pounds, its profile is only 1.75 inches thick, it’s rechargeable, and it’s compatible with existing air supply hoses.

The new low-profile SCBA is just one of many programs and technologies being vetted by R-Tech at first responders’ suggestions. Others include a fire ground compass (“Common Ground,” April 2008), an ocular toxin scanner, a 3-D location device (“Locating the Heroes,” September 2007), and the Dazzler (“Enough to Make You Sick,” July 2007). At least 15 projects are in the works, and more are expected once the TechSolutions Web site is fully up and running.

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Uncommon Operating Picture

When military types and incident commanders talk about getting a common operating picture (COP), they may each have their own notion about what a COP is or ought to be for their needs. The U.S. Joint Forces Command defines a COP as “a single identical display of relevant information shared by more than one command. [It] facilitates collaborative planning and assists all echelons to achieve situational awareness.”

But how? Most COPs are basically electronic push-pin situational awareness maps, based on the same technology that you use to get directions to the nearest mall.

When first responders arrive at the scene of a disaster or an emergency, they have an abundance of data available to them, and access to real-time sensors to keep feeding data, such as cameras, radiation detectors, and air quality monitors. But it can be challenging to integrate, correlate, and effectively fuse all the raw data and the alerts provided by these sources and sensors into a cohesive, easy-to-understand view of what’s going on at the scene.

However, the DHS S&T Directorate is now sponsoring innovative technology that can make this view possible. Called fourDscape^®, the technology will help responders and their commanders to quickly analyze situations, interact with people on the scene, and coordinate a response with a clearly defined mission. It’s produced by Balfour Technologies under a contract with DHS S&T’s Small Business Innovation Research program.

The fourDscape® technology manages a large number of cameras and sensors and then displays the information in a high-resolution, four-dimensional view.

In short, fourDscape^® is capable of managing a large number of cameras and sensors in a virtual, high-resolution, and four-dimensional (4-D) computer display (4-D includes the three traditional dimensions of space, plus the fourth dimension of time). Beyond a basic satellite map of an incident overlaid with data about the locations of buildings and streets, the technology allows the user to monitor cameras at the scene, watch videoconferences with colleagues, and receive alerts to get both contextual and interactive updates. These updates can help a commander understand the totality of a situation—while remaining on-scene—and make tactical decisions.

The fourDscape^® project was put to the test earlier this year during Operation Lupercale, a planning and emergency response exercise that included DHS and the Los Angeles Sherriff’s Department. The exercise simulated a scenario where a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (that is, a car bomb) and a radiological dispersion device (like a dirty bomb) were notionally released against the Tournament of Roses Parade, which takes place on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, Calif. Also included were the L.A. Sherriff’s Bomb Squad, the Hazardous Material Response Team, and other resources in the vicinity of the County Emergency Operations Center of East Los Angeles.

For the test, participants used a 4-D virtual view of the City of Pasadena, which included publicly available county images taken at different and complex camera angles (called ortho and oblique). Next, vivid 3-D building models of the parade route were layered in, followed by simulations of the float traffic, information from a police deployment plan, prerecorded traffic videos, mobile wireless helmet cameras, and even a webcam from one of the parade floats.

During Operation Lupercale, users watched real-time videoconferences and interviews from the scene, including this one with Lt. John Sullivan (right) of the Los Angeles Sherriff’s Department.

“The fourDscape^® management engine took all of the data from those sensors and seamlessly fused them together into a single, visual 4-D scene that was meaningful and useful to the police,” said Stephen Dennis, who manages the project at the Directorate’s Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency. “It gave us a chance to see what it would be like to have true situational awareness during a major, real-world event. It gave us, well, a not-so-common COP.”

“The technology demonstrated the value of integrated visualizations for a variety of specialized responders and command elements,” said Lt. John Sullivan of the L.A. Sherriff’s Department. As his agency continues to test fourDscape^®, the ultimate goal is to begin using it, for real, to support security operations during the actual 2009 parade on New Year’s Day. Stay tuned…

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Schooled in Science

“Kids today!” goes the all-too-common refrain. “How in the world do you teach them about the importance of science and technology? How can you inspire them about science when, it seems, they’re glued all the time to their computers and video games?”

One way could be to harness the technologies and learning approaches used by—what else?—computers and video games. Many educators say that innovative computer programs can teach students, and their teachers, how to think creatively and solve problems just like scientists do.

Daniel Wendel (above) of the MIT Imagination Toolbox team gives a StarLogo TNG demo to middle and high school students. One of the lesson plans challenges students to simulate the start and track of a forest fire (below). The students create and control the behaviors of both the fire and the firefighters.

This, precisely, is the goal of The Imagination Toolbox, a middle and high school teaching initiative created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The initiative is sponsored by the DHS S&T Directorate’s Office of University Programs, which, among other things, supports education to prepare future scientists and leaders in homeland security fields.

Composed of a series of classroom lesson plans, the Toolbox teaches students how to use specialized educational software called StarLogo TNG (for The Next Generation). Developed by MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program, StarLogo TNG is a free computer programming tool that teaches kids to build computer games, models, and simulations using graphics and 3-D images. Basically, the students connect differently shaped graphical blocks, and thereby control the behaviors and actions of characters and things in a 3-D world. They dictate the outcome from start to finish.

The Toolbox looks at real-world problems to teach students how to apply math and science concepts using StarLogo TNG to examine these problems. Students learn that even though a certain situation may not have any apparent or centralized cause, there can still be a systematic reason for it, as well as a systematic way (or ways) to address it. They also learn about how to use computer science to study complex problems.

One lesson plan, for example, challenges students to use StarLogo TNG to simulate the start of a forest fire, as well as coordinate efforts to fight the fire. The kids control various parameters, from the speed of the wind to the speed of the first responders at the scene. They can design areas around houses to reduce wildfire damages, and then test their designs when the fire is lit and the firefighters arrive.

“We want to enable and empower students to think scientifically and become more informed citizens,” said MIT’s Ricarose Roque, who heads up the testing and development of the Toolbox. “We don’t want them to think just in terms of cause and effect; we want them to become more familiar with a systems-thinking approach to understanding pressing and complex problems we have today.”

Roque, along with the rest of the Imagination Toolbox team, is currently piloting curriculum units at a middle school in Lawrence, Mass., north of Boston. The curriculum units investigate real homeland security issues that are the focus of the DHS Centers of Excellence (COEs). Based at leading universities around the country, the COEs are sponsored by University Programs to conduct research in areas of critical importance to DHS, such as how to protect the food supply and prevent epidemics or how to prepare for and respond to natural disasters. The team is designing the lessons by incorporating the basic principles of the COE research.

Based on the feedback from Lawrence, the team is now planning to host a Toolbox workshop at MIT in August. It will be geared toward middle and high school math, science, and technology teachers in the Boston area. There will also be online teacher workshops in the fall, plus new online tools where teachers, students, and other StarLogo TNG users can share their work and explore the work of others.

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S&T Snapshots is a 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.