Business View Magazine | July 2020

6 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2020 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. DisasterTech 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. (Users can sign up for access at Disaster Tech , which also offer free and paid subscription options for a variety of advanced features.) 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