CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Homeland Security SBIR Phase I: Emergency responders are tasked with maintaining awareness of a massive number of disparat

Description

Emergency responders are tasked with maintaining awareness of a massive number of disparate pieces of information, garnered through a broad variety of electronic sources (e.g., emergency alerting systems, semi-structured RSS feeds, computer-aided dispatch). To be effective, these responders need support tools that allow them to automatically visualize and track the location, type, and status of emergency events and relief efforts in real-time within map-based displays. These tools must: (1) provide an intuitive, dynamic symbol system for automatically incorporating mission-critical event and resource data within a visual representation that allows emergency responders to spatially perceive and understand key needs and pain points; (2) provide real-time awareness of shifts in event conditions through direct, intuitive access to decision-critical meta-information that is typically buried within the display, if available at all; and (3) incorporate the contextual awareness of emergency responders by facilitating tailoring of generated symbols as the situation evolves. To help emergency responders more efficiently understand and track the status of crisis events in real-time, we propose a Phase I effort to design and demonstrate the feasibility of a Dynamic Information Environment for Coordinated Attribution of Symbol Traits (DIE-CAST). DIE-CAST will use an intelligent, meta-information driven symbol attribution system to automatically provide emergency responders with dynamically updated representations of mission-critical events and resources within an intuitive geospatial context. This environment will increase the efficiency and effectiveness with which information is used and shared by responders from distinct disciplines, jurisdictions, and response levels, dramatically increasing the speed and success of emergency operations.