HPCwire: 9-1-1 Call Study Offers Potential for Early Warning System

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

February 15, 2008

9-1-1 Call Study Offers Potential for Early Warning System

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

UC San Diego computer study of emergency calls from California wildfires may help in future emergencies

Feb. 13 -- When confronted with emergencies or natural disasters, such as the wildfires that raged through San Diego and Los Angeles counties last October or the tornadoes that hit the southern U.S. last week, residents often dial 9-1-1 as their first course of action.

Now, UC San Diego researchers from the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, using 9-1-1 data from these wildfires and other emergency situations, have devised a method to analyze and visually display these calls to detect specific patterns. Their ultimate goal: to assist in developing an early warning system and coordinate responses on a wider scale that could one day save lives and limit property damage.

"Because of the time-critical element within the first responder community, this research could assist emergency service providers and organizations in allocating appropriate levels of both human and financial resources as part of their overall planning," said Chaitan Baru, SDSC distinguished scientist and one of the project's principal investigators.

Baru, along with researchers from Scripps Oceanography, developed the pattern-detecting method -- a computer algorithm -- after analyzing nearly three years of 9-1-1 call data from the San Francisco Bay area, and more than 20 months of similar data from throughout San Diego County.

The data included time/date/length of the emergency calls, how quickly each call was answered, and phone type (i.e., business, residence or wireless). To protect privacy, the 9-1-1 call locations were converted into latitude and longitude coordinates and then dithered, or randomly blurred, so that the precise location could not be recovered.

By combining the call data with topographic images from Google Earth, researchers conducted a spatiotemporal analysis -- relating both space and time together -- of typical call activity in order to set parameters that would automatically alert viewers of abnormally high call rates. These 'hotspots,' or clusters of activity within certain areas and within predetermined lengths of time, were then directly correlated to specific events in those areas such as an earthquake, explosion or fire.

While SDSC researchers have been doing only retrospective analyses based on collected data, it is a vital first step to creating visual analyses in real time and on a much larger geographic scale, which would require supercomputing resources for data storage and graphics.

"We think this kind of research could enable a command center at the state or county level to complement their current 9-1-1 system with advanced visualization techniques and advanced clustering techniques," said Hector Jasso, a data mining specialist and SDSC co-researcher on the project, called "Spatiotemporal Analysis of 9-1-1 Call Stream Data."

Currently, California's 9-1-1 emergency phone system is overseen by the state's Department of General Services. The DGS coordinates with phone services such as Verizon and AT&T to route the calls to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), where an operator either provides direct assistance or redirects the call to an emergency service provider.

Despite a good level of coordination and emergency services response during the recent southern California wildfires, most PSAPs do not have the capability to coordinate visually via computer-generated images with other PSAPs in their area, and there is no system currently in place to automatically reroute an emergency call to another PSAP if the initial point is overloaded. In addition, calls are often transferred multiple times depending on the type of emergency, which affects overall response times.

Baru believes the SDSC/Scripps Oceanography project could also be beneficial to local governments, many of which are wrestling with budget constraints while striving to provide high levels of emergency service. "It could also allow more efficient coordination of similar services across a greater area in the event of a larger scale disaster," he said.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html