Business View Magazine | July 2020

7 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2020 “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, Wild said. “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’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. CTIL has created two other dashboards that can help with COVID-19 response and recovery: • The S. Travel Restrictions and Closures dashboard was 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 dashboard was 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. For more information about CTIL, contact Wild . “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.” OPENING L INES