The Carnegie-Mellon University, UH and Brown University Team was selected by the Department of Homeland Security to have a site visit for the Proposed DHS Center of Excellence (COE) for Command, Control and Interoperability (C2I) on Janurary 5, 2009
The UH team lead by Dr. Han Le of Southwest Public Safety Technology Center (SWTC) and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering brings in-depth domain expertise in homeland security, via its affiliation with SWTC, and the Houston Ship Channel. The COE will also affiliate with Texas Southern University, NVAC, other parts of DHS, and faculty from UC Irvine and U of New Hampshire.
The proposed COE will be first and foremost a research center addressing topics and methods of direct relevance to DHS, including:
· Model-Based Analytics: The team prposes to represent and model entities, relations and events that form the building blocks of potential threats, plans, consequences, responses and interdictions, including explicit reasoning about uncertainties in observations, inferences, and knowing what we do not know but should find out. Model-based analytics enables “what-if” scenario analysis for decision support in C2I, as well as learning appropriate responses from training instances.
· Early Detection of Nefarious Activities: Most serious homeland threats involve individually innocuous observations lost in a vast sea of other data. The team prposes a suite of statistical learning and pattern discovery technologies to “connect-the-dots” and help uncover such potential threats from heterogeneous data streams.
· Scalable Visualization: Decision makers, threat responders and other DHS personnel need power tools to cope with oceans of information – both raw data, and hypotheses and inferences distilled by the automated analytics. The team will take interactive visualization beyond the state of the art to build adaptive collaborative interfaces tying together networks of responders and decision-makers with different responsibilities and priorities, and with either static or mobile display devices, in a fully interoperable manner.
· Realistic Test-Bed: The team will build and operate a testing environment where simulated or real data can be fed to the analytic software and visualization systems to evaluate and improve the systems and to help with training and education.
The team also prposes aggressive education initiatives, ranging from preparing graduate and undergraduate students to work on DHS-centric new technology (via hands-on research, a new laboratory-centric course, etc.) to training DHS and other field personnel on the use of the technologies and prototypes produced by the COE (via a summer school, the test-bed, etc.)
