FEMA Awards $1 Million Fire/Safety Grant to Researchers
July 7, 2008 / By Anna Lynn Spitzer
Irvine, Calif., July 7, 2008 -- The Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has awarded a $1 million Fire Prevention and Safety grant to University of California, Irvine researchers. The award is designed to support projects that enhance the safety of the public and firefighters from fire and related hazards.
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Lead investigator Sharad Mehrotra, UCI professor of computer science, and co-investigator Nalini Venkatasubramanian, UCI associate professor of computer science, will collaborate with ImageCat, a Long Beach, Calif.-based disaster-response technology company. The researchers will develop and build situational awareness technologies that provide firefighters with synchronized real-time information. These tools are expected to enhance safety and facilitate decision-making for firefighters and other first-responders.
The two-year project, known as SAFIRE (Situational Awareness for Firefighters), augments ongoing research supported by the NSF-funded ResCUE project. The ResCUE grant has been administered by and housed at the UCI division of Calit2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, which will also manage the new award.
Researchers will develop an information-and-control-panel prototype called the Fire Incident Command Board. This device will combine new and existing hardware and software components that can be customized to meet the needs of field incident commanders. FICB tools will allocate resources, monitor status and locale of personnel, and record and interpret site information. The FICBs will integrate and synchronize sensors and other information flows from the site and provide customized views to individual users while seamlessly interacting with each other.
“We are thrilled to receive this award,” Mehrotra said. “During the last several years, our team has developed valuable situation-awareness technologies. We are able to collect diverse data from a variety of sensors, then interpret, fuse and convert it into improved understanding of situations. The FEMA grant gives us the opportunity to explore how these technologies can lead to improved firefighter safety.”
The FEMA grant represents the first major award to the Center for Emergency Response Technologies (CERT), a newly created center at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences. Directed by Mehrotra, CERT is a multidisciplinary research center that coordinates first-responder technology research, and partners with various industry, academic and government research groups.
For more information about the FP&S award go to: http://www.firegrantsupport.com/fps/. For more information regarding CERT, visit: www.cert.ics.uci.edu.
Media Contacts Anna Lynn Spitzer, aspitzer@calit2.uci.edu, 949.824.3317.