Homeland security and the built environment, part 6

Street-smart Streets: Emerging technologies are poised to reshape urban environments, to the benefit of emergency planners and responders among others.

There's no question but that cities have personalities. Whether you're talking about New York or New Orleans, Dallas, Los Angeles or Keokuk, a city's character, real or perceived, is an important civic attribute.

But another characteristic that will assume increasing importance is an urban area's intelligence. And civic IQs around the country are being elevated by continued advances in information technologies that are enabling the endowment of a growing number of sophisticated devices with computing and communications capabilities.

Cell phones, for instance, are born smart, but when they're connected in clever new ways, they make the entire community that much more intelligent. Suppose your cell phone was connected to a network of environmental sensors placed by the thousands around the city. Imagine getting a cell phone, e-mail or Blackberry alert that a toxic cloud or a tornado were approaching, long before civic emergency response organizations or the National Weather Service have a chance to make their own announcements. Such advanced notification could help save lives and property.

Parts of this service already exist. A company called Send Word Now, an automated Web-based emergency notification service, has teamed with WeatherBug to send subscribers wireless alerts on severe weather events such as hurricanes, tornados and even lightning storms.

The swn-Weatherbug collaboration uses live, streaming weather information from a network of 8,000 WeatherBug tracking stations in the U.S., as well as the U.S. Precision Lightning Network and the National Weather Service to plot current weather conditions on 3.2-mile neighborhood-sized grid maps. Traditional alerts are zip-code based, covering areas up to 30 miles across, and can be as much as an hour old.

Near–real-time weather alerts are useful in highly urbanized areas with frequent severe weather, like Tampa or Miami. Since Florida averages 10 lightning deaths and 40 injuries a year, half of which occur during recreational activities, public schools in Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood have signed up for the SWN service to inform coaches and gym teachers of approaching lightning storms. Wal-Mart became a subscriber so they can get customers and inventory to shelter sooner when tornados or hurricanes threaten their stores in Tornado Alley.

The notification service also has the potential to push other types of critical information during emergency events, as well as time-sensitive information on a routine basis. Urban first responder agencies can benefit here.

The service enables response agencies to expand delivery of crisis communication during extreme urban disaster events such as a pandemic or plume dispersal based on predefined parameters. The proactive nature of automated weather and health triggers, in addition to the ability to manually generate alerts, allows for more reliable information delivery. Services such as SWN can deliver notifications to any device, including e-mail, the Web, pda and cell phones, helping to ensure message saturation.

Missing links
The Send Word Now service, and other contemporary communication technologies, of course, assume access to a broadband infrastructure. But no urban area is yet smart enough to have eliminated impoverished areas, and not all low-income residents have cell phones, Blackberries or any other access to the broadband build-out characteristic of the intelligent city. The Intelligent Community Forum, a group interested in how investment in homeland security can be leveraged to promote economic development and social well-being in communities, may have a solution.

Executive director Robert Bell says the core problem with all investment in first responder and security systems is that we would prefer never to use them, which means that valuable assets stand idle most of the time.

"Given the flexibility of digital technologies, we encourage communities to think about using first responder systems to meet ongoing community needs, while always ensuring that community use can be pre-empted in the event of an emergency," Bell says.

An example might be a wireless ip network installed to give first responders much greater information access than is available via two-way radio. Such a network will sit idle most of its lifetime, except perhaps in a large city.

"Why shouldn't the excess capacity be used to meet the needs of low-income residents for broadband connectivity?" Bell wonders. "That delivers two benefits to a community using one asset."

Smart.

Only the beginning
Such examples represent only the beginning of what is possible in the intelligent city. As microprocessors continue to shrink, wireless devices become more compact and powerful. As the cost of these technologies continues to decrease, computing and communications technologies will be embedded into everyday objects of all kinds to allow objects to sense and react to changing environments.

In some respects, the intelligent city will resemble an urban organism, able to assimilate embedded sensors to monitor its organs and limbs, then responding accordingly to potential or actual changes in status in order to maintain equilibrium. Or, as conditions that could indicate an impending disaster are detected, the intelligent city would respond by heightening readiness as appropriate.

A National Research Council group called the Committee on Networked Systems of Embedded Computers speculated in a book published before the 9/11 attacks ("Embedded, Everywhere," National Academy Press, 2001) that networks comprising thousands or millions of sensors could monitor the environment, the battlefield or the factory floor.

Five years later, some efforts have evolved beyond speculation. At Carnegie Mellon University, for example, the Center for Wireless and Broadband Networking is looking at ways to embed sensor networks in critical infrastructures, like power grids, telephone networks and bridges.

Center associate director Jon Peha says we would be safer if our water distribution system could warn us automatically after someone had dumped dangerous chemicals in it, or if the levees of New Orleans could warn us when they are at risk of failure.

Peha's lab is also looking at how sensors and communications technology can make first responders more effective after a major disaster.

"Imagine a fire in a building known to contain biohazards," Peha says. "Future firefighters may scatter devices that can collect valuable information about the dangers and transmit that data back to a command center."

We're not there yet, but some communities are taking advantage of recent communications breakthroughs to take the first steps toward more intelligent emergency management. The southern Illinois town of O'Fallon is an example.

O'Fallon wouldn't be the first place most people would consider to be in danger of natural or manmade disasters, but it's actually more vulnerable than most. It lies in tornado country, sits near the seismically active New Madrid Fault, has a railroad that runs through the center of town that carries hazardous material, and is close to Scott Air Force Base, a major refueling point.

To facilitate more effective emergency response, the city recently installed a system (by Coach2100, Vero Beach, Fla.) that makes incompatible frequencies a non-issue. The system allows emergency responders and government officials, including fire, medical, police, and public works agencies, to communicate with each other in real time via cellular broadband and data satellite links.

"The system's central interactive environment makes radio-controlled command posts with their 30-minute old information obsolete," says Mayor Gary Graham.

Progress on the ground 
A few other intelligent city technologies are surfacing. New Jersey has a sound surveillance system in place on the streets of Newark that can hear and locate a gunshot within seconds of the shot being fired.

"The ability to localize a gunshot is highly significant so law enforcement resources can respond to delineated areas as opposed to scouring a large area of the city where the shot may or may not have originated," says Herb Hauser, president of Midtown Technologies, technology infrastructure consultants.

Another useful emerging technology analyzes wind direction and speed in relation to the way airborne plumes are propagated in and around tall structures. This is seen as an improvement over current plume analysis, which is conducted from historical data fed into supercomputers, often far from the area of interest.

Some cities have begun installing wireless detection equipment that will report wind direction and strength in real time and hence provide immediate, accurate plume projections, Hauser says. "Such plume projections are critical in order to manage industrial accidents, fires, and airborne acts of terrorism. If you know where the plume is heading and how long it will take to reach certain points, you can respond emergency personnel more effectively."

The city of Cambridge, Mass, is in the midst of a project called CitySense, a collaboration between the city, BBN Technologies and Harvard University, funded by the National Science Foundation, the goal of which is to build and deploy a shared urban sensor network test bed.

The test bed will consist of 100 streetlight-mounted sensor nodes, each equipped with an extensible suite of wireless and network-capable sensors. The sensors will initially include weather measurements, such as wind speed, direction, temperature, air pressure, relative humidity and rainfall, explains Josh Bers, Mobile Networking Systems, BBN Technologies. Radios will enable the nodes to communicate across a mesh network. Control software will enable remote access for researchers to test out new algorithms for distributed sensor data-processing and wireless networking in a real-world environment, Bers says.

Building on the work of wired test beds such as PlanetLab (an open platform for developing, deploying and accessing planetary-scale services, CitySense will enable resource sharing of its wireless sensor nodes.

"Unlike prior sensor networks, where power and battery life were the major design constraints, CitySense nodes are powered by the local electric grid, enabling many novel applications," Bers says.

Some candidate applications include real-time monitoring of the environment, such as tracking the spread of pollutants or toxins.

New grid on the block
Hauser says the future of smart city initiatives will come from two major approaches. The first will be based on long-distance satellite surveillance, and the second on information gathered in the cities themselves. Both will require massive amounts of information-processing and -modeling.

"What will be sorely needed in the future is the software that can categorize and analyze the inputs, intelligently issue alerts to proper units at proper locations, then manage their coordinated response, all within a very short time frame."

This is where grid computing comes in.

The essence of grid computing, as defined by Matt Haynos, program director for Grid Marketing and Strategy, IBM, lies in the efficient and optimal utilization of a wide range of heterogeneous, loosely coupled resources in an organization tied to sophisticated workload management capabilities.

As applied to the Intelligent City concept, computer systems from a broad spectrum of public and private infrastructure and services, including buildings, utilities, transport networks, health and human services, and emergency management services, would be interconnected, integrating data, storage, networking and computer resources. Resources would be dynamic, allocated to and removed from the grid on an ongoing basis.

"Thus, during an emergency, such as a hurricane or terrorist's dirty-bomb attack, critical data, storage, networking and computational resources would be provisioned to enable high intensity computing for activities such as location and dispatch of emergency and evacuation vehicles," says Eva Lerner-Lam, president of the Transportation and Development Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The grid would also manage video; process data from sensors detecting chemical, biological or physical changes in the environment; and direct IP-based communications for emergency management, law enforcement, fire and medical responders.

"When the emergency is over and recovery is phased in, resource provisioning would adapt to those new demands," Lerner-Lam says. "Then, as recovery progresses, resources would continuously be re-provisioned accordingly."

Lerner-Lam says the advantages of such a grid scheme would be speed and accuracy of computing services, with significant savings in the cost of computing technology and data collection, management, transmission, and mining compared to current, non-gridded, stove-piped computing environments.

Leadership in Asia
Although there are several successful examples of the use of grid technology in academia and the sciences for the design of drugs by pharmaceutical researchers and for weather prediction, there are currently no examples in urban management, certainly not in the U.S., although Lerner-Lam says China is embarking on a national grid project www.csis.hku.hk/~clwang/grid/cngrid.html.

It might not be surprising that the one place where there is at least some progress toward building intelligent city "clusters" is Singapore. (Clusters are different from grids, but they are an integral part of Singapore's plan toward building a grid for all of Asia and eventually the world <www.sla.gov.sg/what_we_do/land_information/land_data_hub.html>.)

"The amount of interagency, public-private, large-small business cooperation, and the long-term view of the benefits and sacrifices of working together required to establish an intelligent city grid computing system is simply easier to coax along and to manage in a totalitarian state," says Lerner-Lam.

If grid computing is still far off in the future for U.S. cities, it's not inconceivable that some inroads may soon be made on the emergency management/homeland security front.

"Due to the clear advantages of shared and integrated computing resources for emergency response, and the politically-sensitive nature of public perceptions of the effectiveness of government response to natural and man-made hazards and threats, some progress may be expected, spurred on by politicians, law enforcement, emergency management, fire, medical, homeland security and other public and private entities (including building owners and managers) responsible for public health, safety and property," Lerner-Lam says.

"By limiting grid functionality to emergency management and homeland security applications, grid computing may eventually make a debut in American cities."

Douglas Page writes about science and technology from Pine Mountain, Calif.