Purdue opens center to analyze homeland security data

A kick-off event will take place for the Purdue University Regional Visualization and Analytics Center (PURVAC) at 1 p.m. March 7 in Stewart Center, rooms 302 and 306.

Jim Thomas, director of the Department of Homeland Security National Visualization and Analytics Center, and Eric Dietz, executive director of the Indiana Department of Homeland Security, will explain how the center will develop technology to improve national security. Discovery Park executive director Alan Rebar and David S. Ebert, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the center's director, will provide an overview and demonstrate PURVAC projects.

Thomas said the center, funded by a $750,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security and $387,000 from Purdue, will equip a team of Purdue and Indiana University School of Medicine researchers to create tools to analyze vast amounts of information involving intelligence analysis, emergency planning and health-care monitoring.

The team's tools will then be deployed for use by homeland security and emergency response personnel. In the area of health-care monitoring and management, the team will develop advanced analytical tools to monitor and quickly recognize signs of natural, biological and chemical incidents.

Thomas said the center's purpose is to translate the overwhelming into the manageable.

"The complexity and massive amounts of data and the variety of sources from which it comes impose unique challenges," Thomas said. "The goal of the center is to turn this sea of data into functional information to help users perform their jobs effectively."

Ebert said the amount of information gathered during a crisis can be crushing if not managed correctly.

"The general idea is to tightly integrate analysis, abstraction and visual representation to enable an effective decision-making environment," Ebert said. "For instance, in the event of a catastrophic event such as a chemical spill, natural disaster, disease outbreak or a terrorist attack, information will be coming from many sources, including images from cameras, data from sensors and simulations, and text documents from police and health-care agencies."

Ebert said one of the team's greatest challenges will be to create a software system that not only integrates different kinds of data, but also presents the information in ways that analysts, decision makers and emergency workers using various types of displays and requiring different kinds of information can easily understand.

"It isn't that you take all the data and present it the same way to everybody," Ebert said. "Instead, you really need to extract the relevant data and tailor how you display the information for each person, their task, and for the capability of their display. If they have a cell phone-type device or a personal digital assistant, you can't effectively display things the same way you would for large screens on desktops."

The interdisciplinary team will consist of about 20 Purdue faculty and graduate researchers from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the departments of Computer Science and Statistics, and the Krannert School of Management. The center is affiliated with four facilities in Purdue's Discovery Park, the university's hub for interdisciplinary research: the Purdue Homeland Security Institute, Cyber Center, e-Enterprise Center and the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering.

PURVAC also will collaborate closely with the Indiana University School of Medicine, the Indiana Department of Homeland Security and the Indiana State Department of Health, as well as researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada and The University of Stuttgart.

Writer: Marydell Forbes, (765) 496-7704, mforbes@purdue.edu

Sources: David S. Ebert (765) 494-9064, ebertd@ecn.purdue.edu

Andrea Turner, National Visualization and Analytics Center media relations, (509) 375-3893, andrea.turner@pnl.gov

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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