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Page 82
C—
Synopsis of the CSTB Report Computing and Communications in the
Extreme
The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board's (CSTB's)
report Computing and Communications in the Extreme: Research for
Crisis Management and Other Applications1 too some initial steps in exploring
the role of information technology in crisis management.
Discussions at the workshops convened by the steering committee for
the project spanned many aspects of computing and communications
technology research, development, deployment, and use, focusing on
crisis management as the primary application area. The workshops
generated ideas about where high-performance technology may be
helpful, where advances in performance at the leading edge would
yield benefits in more mainstream systems, and how the interaction
of applications in different areas (e.g., the use of telemedicine
and digital libraries in crisis response) influences the
development and use of advanced computing and communications.
Promising computer science and engineering research topics were
identified in discussions between crisis management experts and
information technologists at the workshops and were developed
further in subsequent deliberations by the authoring steering
committee. Research in these areas has "the potential to increase
the ability of individuals and organizations to make the most of
important applications, to present in
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OCR for page 82
Page 82
C—
Synopsis of the CSTB Report Computing and Communications in the
Extreme
The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board's (CSTB's)
report Computing and Communications in the Extreme: Research for
Crisis Management and Other Applications1 too some initial steps in exploring
the role of information technology in crisis management.
Discussions at the workshops convened by the steering committee for
the project spanned many aspects of computing and communications
technology research, development, deployment, and use, focusing on
crisis management as the primary application area. The workshops
generated ideas about where high-performance technology may be
helpful, where advances in performance at the leading edge would
yield benefits in more mainstream systems, and how the interaction
of applications in different areas (e.g., the use of telemedicine
and digital libraries in crisis response) influences the
development and use of advanced computing and communications.
Promising computer science and engineering research topics were
identified in discussions between crisis management experts and
information technologists at the workshops and were developed
further in subsequent deliberations by the authoring steering
committee. Research in these areas has "the potential to increase
the ability of individuals and organizations to make the most of
important applications, to present in
1Computer
Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council.
1997. Computing and Communications in the Extreme: Research for
Crisis Management and Other Applications. National Academy
Press, Washington, D.C.
OCR for page 83
Page 83
tellectually stimulating challenges for researchers, and to
promote significant advances in the state of technology," according
to the report (p. 7).
Research topics suggested in the report include communications
resources such as rapidly deployable, self-configuring wireless
networks for coordinating response teams; "judgment support" tools
to assist crisis managers in making decisions in the absence of
complete, reliable information; simulations of phenomena such as
hurricanes and fires that could deliver useful results to crisis
managers rapidly; and virtual "anchor desks" that would place
network-based resources such as simulations and information systems
at the disposal of crisis managers.
The steering committee developed 11 findings based on input from
the workshops and additional, related information. The findings
have a number of common themes. One is that some of the greatest
technical challenges stem from the sheer scale (i.e., numbers of
people and devices, diversity of resources, amount of computing
power, complexity of interactions) of the requirements that must be
met. Another theme is that the technologies must be easy enough to
use to complement the users rather than distract them from their
missions.
The report observes that the widespread interconnection of
computing and information resources has made it feasible, and
increasingly common, for resources to be called on in unforeseen
ways. "Crisis management, in particular, illustrates the value of
being able to integrate highly diverse resources whose usefulness
in an unusual situation could not have been anticipated in advance.
Unfortunately, technologies developed to meet a specific
application requirement often do not function well in unforeseen
circumstances because of complex, difficult problems of
interoperation, performance, and scaling up," the report notes (p.
6). Consequently, the steering committee's findings suggest R&D
and deployment efforts that can lead to both architectural
approaches for systems that function on a national scale and
general-purpose tools and services that facilitate rapid, ad hoc
integration of systems and resources.
In developing the findings, the steering committee identified
several characteristics of crisis management that place particular
stress on adoption and exploitation of advanced information
technologies:
• Magnitude. Crises can overwhelm available
resources. For example, communications systems, power plants,
hospital systems, and weather centers can all be saturated in a
crisis. How can systems be developed that have "surge capacity" or
that can respond usefully while in a saturated state?
• Urgency. Rapid response in communication and
information services to the special loads of crises is essential.
It can lead, for example, to communication architectures that
provide priority service for crisis man-
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Page 84
agers. There can also be a kind of ''engineering urgency," in
which interoperation must be established between systems in a
matter of hours to satisfy the information needs of responders.
• Infrequency and uncertainty. Some high-magnitude
events, such as earthquakes, occur infrequently and in
unpredictable locations. How can agencies manage resources to be
able to respond effectively, given the reality of constrained
budgets? Can information systems be architected to be usable
despite the unpredictability of demand?
• Special information needs. A crisis can cause
unusual demands both for information flows to and from the crisis
area and for consolidation or fusion of information to meet
responder needs. For example, in the Oklahoma City bombing of April
1995, information about the Murrah building and nearby buildings
was collected from many sources and then "fused" to form a
composite model that helped identify high-probability locations to
find missing people.
The CSTB report identifies and elaborates on research needs
motivated by crisis management. In addition, the report developed a
set of findings regarding the role of research in crisis management
and other national-scale applications of high-performance computing
and communications technology:
• Crisis management testbeds. Finding 1 emphasizes
the value of establishing experimental testbeds for crisis
management-related R&D. Such testbeds provide a venue for
government, academic, and industrial researchers to work with
application users, such as federal, state, and local crisis
managers, to test and validate technologies by subjecting them to
realistic applications. This was the principal finding relating to
the process of collaboration between the two communities.
• Infrastructure baselining. Finding 2 highlights
the importance of investigating the design and operation of
existing national-scale infrastructures to identify which features
enable these systems to be scalable, to accommodate diverse
components, and to evolve over time.
• Usability and collaboration. Findings 3 and 4
suggest ways to improve support for the human-computer interface
and for human activities mediated by computing. The findings call
for research to gain a better understanding of users' needs,
capabilities, and limitations, as well as research to develop
concepts for new, open, network-based collaboration tools, such as
virtual situation rooms.
• Standards, interoperability, integration, and
legacy. Four findings (5, 6, 7, and 8) are devoted to
addressing the critical issues that affect system composability and
interoperability. The findings call for research to identify design
principles that can yield open standards such as communica-
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Page 85
tions protocols, and research to develop generic technology that
can facilitate interconnection and semantic interoperation of
diverse information resources. Additional research is suggested to
develop ways to predict the performance and reliability of the
components used to construct software systems and to develop
technological and architectural methods to maintain access to
long-standing information and software assets while also enabling
users to exploit new technologies as they become available.
• Adaptivity and reliability. Findings 9 and 10 deal
with adaptation to uncertainty and change, including on-the-fly
adaptation to changes in topology, load, or environment. These
findings call for research to increase the adaptivity of networks
and applications so they can function during or after crises and
research to enable accurate assessments of the reliability of
systems composed of potentially unreliable hardware, software, and
people.
• Distributed systems performance. Finding 11 calls
for research to improve understanding of how to reason about,
measure, predict, and improve the performance of distributed
systems, given that most crisis-support systems involve highly
distributed configurations operating in unanticipated ways.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
crisis managers
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