Computer Engineering's Emergency Connectivity Project Awarded $200K

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $200,000 to the SJSU research team of Kaikai Liu, Younghee Park, Jerry Gao (Computer Engineering), and Frances Edwards (Political Science). The funding will be used to develop a self-powered community infrastructure for emergency connectivity that can operate after catastrophic occurrences such as earthquakes, weather-related disasters, or terrorist attacks. The developmental site for this new technology will be the City of San José.

One of the key factors for creating a safer and more resilient community is rapid communication from citizens to public safety agencies during an emergency. Making it possible for citizens to provide disaster assessment information from their own locations - describing traffic, environmental and safety issues -creates a more comprehensive view of community conditions, which leads to more effective emergency responses.

To accomplish this, he team’s research will focus on multi-modal communication, a software-designed edge cloud, and mobile enabled resilient quality test and automatic validation. The research conducted will be highly integrated into SJSU computer engineering courses and senior design projects.

2016