:: Deepquest ::

It would begin with a worldwide virus outbreak that had cities under quarantine, emergency workers overwhelmed and government agencies unable to cope. It would be compounded by cyberterror attacks that cut off power, phones and Internet access.
Sounds cool hein?

Such was the simulated crisis that teams from the Pentagon, nongovernmental agencies and several dozen technology companies set out to handle in a five-day exercise this month that was meant to showcase and test a new set of digital tools for responding to disaster.
The limitations of even the latest technology were made apparent in the simulation, when an effort to restore communications by setting up wireless networks resulted in a three-day data traffic jam.
Yet the problems encountered in the training effort, named Strong Angel III, failed to discourage the participants, a diverse group of more than 800 “first responders,” military officers and software and wireless network experts – some from rivals like Microsoft and Google, working side by side.
“My view is that the value of Strong Angel is 70 percent in the social networks that will be created,” said the organizer, Eric Rasmussen, a Navy surgeon and veteran of relief efforts on several continents. “What we do is try to bring people with disparate backgrounds together and ensure that they are forced to enter into a conversation.”
More than $35 million in equipment was assembled in San Diego as part of the event, which was aimed at preparing for natural disasters, epidemics, terrorist attacks or the aftermath of a war.
On Aug. 21, the group began to assemble a makeshift command center at an abandoned building near the airport in San Diego. But a state-of-the-art wireless network, which was intended to route video images, satellite map coordinates and other data from an array of mobile computers, failed to come to life.
“Finally I said, ‘Lights out! Everyone turn everything off and let’s start over,'” said Brian Steckler, a computer scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, who was in charge of more than a dozen interlocking networks at the heart of the command center.
Hundreds of computers and even cellphones were shut down, and then the network was turned back on, segment by segment. Too many high-bandwidth applications had clogged the network, including a powerful video camera and “rogue” transmitters set up by participants intent on creating their own mini-networks.
Computer researchers call wireless networks of this type “hastily formed networks.” But Steckler said his experience in the training session and in real disasters had led him to refer to them as “fragilely formed networks” instead.
But the technology roadblocks were balanced by notable successes, like the work of Google, Microsoft, ESRI, Intergraph and other companies to allow the sharing of a single set of digital satellite maps seamlessly and to overlay event data relayed from emergency workers throughout the San Diego area.
The new software capability relies on a Microsoft-designed system called Simple Sharing Extensions. It has been built on industry standards, like the Web protocol known as Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, which was designed to enable one-way data streams.
Such tools are valuable for disaster- response coordinators who require real-time data feeds from a variety of locations.
The Microsoft extensions will make it possible for the feeds to display constantly changing or even conflicting data streams from multiple sources.
Moreover, the achievement demonstrated that industry rivals like Microsoft and Google could cooperatively generate useful technologies.
Small teams of programmers from the two companies sat before laptops at adjacent tables to make sure that the Microsoft software connection system would transfer information to Google Earth, Google’s visual mapping tool.
“I’ve been talking to Google all week,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, lead architect of Microsoft’s humanitarian systems group.
That is the kind of teamwork that Rasmussen had in mind when organizing the Strong Angel event, the third such exercise held since 2000.
Rasmussen has become a leading figure in high-tech emergency preparedness in the United States and internationally. His expertise has been honed by experience in Bosnia and Baghdad, in African refugee camps, in Indonesia after the tsunami and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Working a decade ago in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon, he began exploring the use of high-tech systems to support the emergency missions that he would serve in as a doctor.
“People are dying in really ugly ways, and it’s avoidable,” he said.
That led him to organize Strong Angel, which he said was not a formal disaster exercise, but rather a laboratory to experiment with technology that might prove useful in disaster settings. He likened the event to a group of musicians playing casual jazz, rather than a rigorous symphony.
That unstructured approach led to some frustrations among participants, who complained at times that they were uncertain of their duties. But Rasmussen said the situation was meant to force them to organize themselves in a leadership vacuum.
Rasmussen’s effort has the support of Linton Wells 2nd, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration at the Pentagon. Wells, a military strategist, was a driving force behind a Pentagon directive last November that put “stability operations” – defined as “military and civilian activities conducted across the spectrum from peace to conflict to establish or maintain order” – on an equal footing with waging war as a primary mission for the military.
Recognizing the shortcomings of reconstruction efforts after the invasion of Iraq, the directive said that much of this work was best performed by “indigenous, foreign or U.S. civilian professionals.”
“We want to be able to create a space outside of the Pentagon’s network firewalls to offer assistance,” Wells said. Such a shift in mission would make it easier, for example, to provide Pentagon imagery from satellites and unmanned Predator aircraft to disaster relief organizations, he said.
It took 300 e-mail messages and ultimately the intervention of a fleet admiral to get Rasmussen and two colleagues to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in the days immediately after the tsunami in December 2004. Such missions need to be on the military’s checklist, Wells said.
In addition to large technology firms like Cisco Systems, Mitre and Bell Canada, smaller companies demonstrated a range of initiatives last week, tucked amid a phalanx of big trucks that had brought communications equipment to the command site.
VSee Lab, a Silicon Valley startup, brought a video-conferencing software system made to transmit video over today’s cellular telephone data networks at good quality.
GATR Technologies, a two-person company in Huntsville, Alabama, brought a satellite communications antenna tucked inside a large inflatable beach ball made of ultralight racing sail cloth.
The system, designed by Paul Gierow, a former aerospace engineer, weighs a little more than 70 pounds, or 30 kilograms, and makes it possible to deploy a two-megabit Internet connection – faster than many digital phone lines – virtually anywhere.
SAN DIEGO It would begin with a worldwide virus outbreak that had cities under quarantine, emergency workers overwhelmed and government agencies unable to cope. It would be compounded by cyberterror attacks that cut off power, phones and Internet access.
Such was the simulated crisis that teams from the Pentagon, nongovernmental agencies and several dozen technology companies set out to handle in a five-day exercise this month that was meant to showcase and test a new set of digital tools for responding to disaster.
The limitations of even the latest technology were made apparent in the simulation, when an effort to restore communications by setting up wireless networks resulted in a three-day data traffic jam.
Yet the problems encountered in the training effort, named Strong Angel III, failed to discourage the participants, a diverse group of more than 800 “first responders,” military officers and software and wireless network experts – some from rivals like Microsoft and Google, working side by side.
“My view is that the value of Strong Angel is 70 percent in the social networks that will be created,” said the organizer, Eric Rasmussen, a Navy surgeon and veteran of relief efforts on several continents. “What we do is try to bring people with disparate backgrounds together and ensure that they are forced to enter into a conversation.”
More than $35 million in equipment was assembled in San Diego as part of the event, which was aimed at preparing for natural disasters, epidemics, terrorist attacks or the aftermath of a war.
On Aug. 21, the group began to assemble a makeshift command center at an abandoned building near the airport in San Diego. But a state-of-the-art wireless network, which was intended to route video images, satellite map coordinates and other data from an array of mobile computers, failed to come to life.
“Finally I said, ‘Lights out! Everyone turn everything off and let’s start over,'” said Brian Steckler, a computer scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, who was in charge of more than a dozen interlocking networks at the heart of the command center.
Hundreds of computers and even cellphones were shut down, and then the network was turned back on, segment by segment. Too many high-bandwidth applications had clogged the network, including a powerful video camera and “rogue” transmitters set up by participants intent on creating their own mini-networks.
Computer researchers call wireless networks of this type “hastily formed networks.” But Steckler said his experience in the training session and in real disasters had led him to refer to them as “fragilely formed networks” instead.
But the technology roadblocks were balanced by notable successes, like the work of Google, Microsoft, ESRI, Intergraph and other companies to allow the sharing of a single set of digital satellite maps seamlessly and to overlay event data relayed from emergency workers throughout the San Diego area.
The new software capability relies on a Microsoft-designed system called Simple Sharing Extensions. It has been built on industry standards, like the Web protocol known as Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, which was designed to enable one-way data streams.
Such tools are valuable for disaster- response coordinators who require real-time data feeds from a variety of locations.
The Microsoft extensions will make it possible for the feeds to display constantly changing or even conflicting data streams from multiple sources.
Moreover, the achievement demonstrated that industry rivals like Microsoft and Google could cooperatively generate useful technologies.
Small teams of programmers from the two companies sat before laptops at adjacent tables to make sure that the Microsoft software connection system would transfer information to Google Earth, Google’s visual mapping tool.
“I’ve been talking to Google all week,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, lead architect of Microsoft’s humanitarian systems group.
That is the kind of teamwork that Rasmussen had in mind when organizing the Strong Angel event, the third such exercise held since 2000.
Rasmussen has become a leading figure in high-tech emergency preparedness in the United States and internationally. His expertise has been honed by experience in Bosnia and Baghdad, in African refugee camps, in Indonesia after the tsunami and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Working a decade ago in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon, he began exploring the use of high-tech systems to support the emergency missions that he would serve in as a doctor.
“People are dying in really ugly ways, and it’s avoidable,” he said.
That led him to organize Strong Angel, which he said was not a formal disaster exercise, but rather a laboratory to experiment with technology that might prove useful in disaster settings. He likened the event to a group of musicians playing casual jazz, rather than a rigorous symphony.
That unstructured approach led to some frustrations among participants, who complained at times that they were uncertain of their duties. But Rasmussen said the situation was meant to force them to organize themselves in a leadership vacuum.
Rasmussen’s effort has the support of Linton Wells 2nd, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration at the Pentagon. Wells, a military strategist, was a driving force behind a Pentagon directive last November that put “stability operations” – defined as “military and civilian activities conducted across the spectrum from peace to conflict to establish or maintain order” – on an equal footing with waging war as a primary mission for the military.
Recognizing the shortcomings of reconstruction efforts after the invasion of Iraq, the directive said that much of this work was best performed by “indigenous, foreign or U.S. civilian professionals.”
“We want to be able to create a space outside of the Pentagon’s network firewalls to offer assistance,” Wells said. Such a shift in mission would make it easier, for example, to provide Pentagon imagery from satellites and unmanned Predator aircraft to disaster relief organizations, he said.
It took 300 e-mail messages and ultimately the intervention of a fleet admiral to get Rasmussen and two colleagues to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in the days immediately after the tsunami in December 2004. Such missions need to be on the military’s checklist, Wells said.
In addition to large technology firms like Cisco Systems, Mitre and Bell Canada, smaller companies demonstrated a range of initiatives last week, tucked amid a phalanx of big trucks that had brought communications equipment to the command site.
VSee Lab, a Silicon Valley startup, brought a video-conferencing software system made to transmit video over today’s cellular telephone data networks at good quality.
GATR Technologies, a two-person company in Huntsville, Alabama, brought a satellite communications antenna tucked inside a large inflatable beach ball made of ultralight racing sail cloth.
The system, designed by Paul Gierow, a former aerospace engineer, weighs a little more than 70 pounds, or 30 kilograms, and makes it possible to deploy a two-megabit Internet connection – faster than many digital phone lines – virtually anywhere.
SAN DIEGO It would begin with a worldwide virus outbreak that had cities under quarantine, emergency workers overwhelmed and government agencies unable to cope. It would be compounded by cyberterror attacks that cut off power, phones and Internet access.
Such was the simulated crisis that teams from the Pentagon, nongovernmental agencies and several dozen technology companies set out to handle in a five-day exercise this month that was meant to showcase and test a new set of digital tools for responding to disaster.
The limitations of even the latest technology were made apparent in the simulation, when an effort to restore communications by setting up wireless networks resulted in a three-day data traffic jam.
Yet the problems encountered in the training effort, named Strong Angel III, failed to discourage the participants, a diverse group of more than 800 “first responders,” military officers and software and wireless network experts – some from rivals like Microsoft and Google, working side by side.
“My view is that the value of Strong Angel is 70 percent in the social networks that will be created,” said the organizer, Eric Rasmussen, a Navy surgeon and veteran of relief efforts on several continents. “What we do is try to bring people with disparate backgrounds together and ensure that they are forced to enter into a conversation.”
More than $35 million in equipment was assembled in San Diego as part of the event, which was aimed at preparing for natural disasters, epidemics, terrorist attacks or the aftermath of a war.
On Aug. 21, the group began to assemble a makeshift command center at an abandoned building near the airport in San Diego. But a state-of-the-art wireless network, which was intended to route video images, satellite map coordinates and other data from an array of mobile computers, failed to come to life.
“Finally I said, ‘Lights out! Everyone turn everything off and let’s start over,'” said Brian Steckler, a computer scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, who was in charge of more than a dozen interlocking networks at the heart of the command center.
Hundreds of computers and even cellphones were shut down, and then the network was turned back on, segment by segment. Too many high-bandwidth applications had clogged the network, including a powerful video camera and “rogue” transmitters set up by participants intent on creating their own mini-networks.
Computer researchers call wireless networks of this type “hastily formed networks.” But Steckler said his experience in the training session and in real disasters had led him to refer to them as “fragilely formed networks” instead.

more from [url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/28/business/disaster.php]The Herald Tribune[/url]