Indiana University’s Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab helps build data-science tool to provide immediate, easily accessible data to quicken response, save lives
BLOOMINGTON, Ind.— Indiana University faculty, students and staff at IU’s Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab (CTIL) in IU’s Pervasive Technology Institute, working with collaborating partner Disaster Tech, have created a data-science tool to help emergency managers keep their communities safe.
The DICE dashboard (Data-science Integrated Collaboration Environment) helps emergency managers know, at a glance, what resources they have available in a crisis situation. DICE aggregates huge amounts of information on crucial aspects of a community’s infrastructure, including fire, police, and health and medical.
Emergency managers are in charge of making sure that first responders and the public have all the resources they need in disasters, and the current pandemic is no exception. As the crisis becomes increasingly severe, emergency managers need immediate, easily accessible information to effectively respond to calls for assistance.
CTIL is devoted to helping those on the front lines of emergency and crisis response through the use of next-generation technologies.
“Every time an emergency manager needs to look at a different dataset, that costs them time, and time is not a luxury that anybody has in a situation like this,” said William Liao, project coordinator in the CTIL. “We’re trying to put all of these disparate data sources into one view.”
CTIL is devoted to helping those on the front lines of emergency and crisis response through the use of next-generation technologies. The tools the lab builds cut down on the time it takes to analyze and act upon an unfolding situation.
Many emergency managers are working with decades-old tools and they often don’t have the means to answer basic questions quickly, such as what’s going on with the incident, how it’s changing and what sort of critical information everyone needs to know, said David Wild, associate professor of informatics at IU and a founding member of CTIL. The lab and its partners were already working on a public dashboard for emergency managers, but COVID-19 sped everything up.
“We did a wide survey of emergency managers,” Wild said. “We had a user experience expert work with survey participants to understand what information, what insights, what data they need to know right now.”
CTIL partnered with Disaster Tech, a company with expertise in data science and curation. Disaster Tech brought in Microsoft for its engineers and disaster response expertise, Kinetica for its software and data engineers, and NVIDIA for its graphical processing units (GPUs) to perform high performance computing operations. “With these partners on board, we had all the right resources together to build a really scalable, fast, useful dashboard organized around community lifelines,” Wild said.
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a community lifeline “enables the continuous operation of critical government and business functions and is essential to human health and safety or economic security.” They are:
- Health and medical
- Communications
- Transportation
- Safety and security
- Energy (power and fuel)
- Hazardous materials
- Food, water, and shelter
The DICE dashboard aggregates this crucial information so responders can quickly get a lay of the land, so to speak. Some of the data the lab and its partners work with are public, such as the locations of hospitals, urgent care clinics, nursing homes, shelters and schools that can be used as temporary hospitals. Some of the data are not public, but useful to emergency responders in a pandemic. And some of the data are proprietary and specific only to a particular community. The dashboard allows emergency managers to upload that data and login securely so only they have access.
“We have all these sensors out there and crowdsourcing that can be leveraged to give you the predictive and situational awareness to get ahead of the curve and response with agility,” said Sean Griffin, founder and chief executive officer of Disaster Tech.
CTIL has created two other dashboards that can help with COVID-19 response and recovery:
- The Travel Restrictions and Closures dashboardwas created in 24 hours. It helped IU administrators track what travel restrictions would be in place for students going home or when leaving their home states to return to campus.
- The Business Vulnerability Index dashboardwas a project CTIL had already begun through a project funded by the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA). This tool, built in partnership with Indiana University’s StatsAmerica, is part of a wider research project to help the EDA understand the relationship between risk, resilience and cost of a disaster in communities across the country.
CTIL’s COVID-19 work is largely done by volunteers. The lab is pursuing potential grant funding and other resources to continue its work on the pandemic. “From the IU side, there’s a lot of people who’ve essentially donated their time to this effort as a matter of public service,” Liao said. “A lot of people worked evenings and weekends with a goal of advancing this project as quickly and efficiently as possible. The sooner we can put this into an emergency manager’s hands, the more effective we hope they’ll be able to be at their efforts.”
