Ubiquitous computing for disaster response, mitigation and recovery

Abstract: Disasters take many forms. Large scale, immediate disasters such as earthquakes, wildfires, floods, chemical spills, and terrorist events cause human suffering on a societal scale. However, individual and slowly-evolving disasters such as declining health and contaminated water supplies can be no less devastating. Across the spectrum, the impact of a given disaster on people and their environments, and possibly the disaster itself, could be mitigated by the use of ubiquitous computing networks that combine sensors and actuators with computing and communication systems.

Computing systems could make significant contributions to each of these issues by combining networks of sensors and actuators, sometimes carried by robots, with information systems to perform data mining, fusion and management to improve the quality of information available; to provide intelligent assistance to improve decision-making, rapid planning, resource allocation, and incident command response; and for telemedicine. The result would be a great enhancement of the efficiency and effectiveness of the current 9-1-1 emergency response system.

This talk will discuss technical and societal challenges in building such a system, propose metrics for evaluating its success, and speculate about possible spinoff applications that could use much of the same technology. A video simulating such a system used for emergency response to an earthquake will be shown.

Speaker Bio: Joel S. Birnbaum is chief scientist of Hewlett-Packard Company. In this newly created position, he reports directly to HP CEO and President, Carly Fiorina. Birnbaum's role is to continue to help the company shape its technology strategy and to communicate this strategy to the marketplace. He is located in Palo Alto, California.

Before becoming HP's chief scientist, Birnbaum was senior vice president for research and development (R&D) and director of HP Laboratories -- a role he retired from, at the age of 61, in February 1999. HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company's central research and development facility, has headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., with additional branches in Bristol, England; Tokyo, Japan; and Haifa, Israel. He was responsible for the coordination of worldwide activities in R&D and served as the company's chief technical officer.

Birnbaum joined HP in 1980 after 15 years at IBM Corp.'s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where he had last served as director of computer sciences. His first assignment at HP was as the founding director of the Computer Research Center within HP Labs, which conducted research into new directions in computer architecture, hardware and software, as well as some novel applications. One of the technologies developed was the precursor of HP Precision Architecture, the basis for all HP's RISC computers.

In 1984, Birnbaum was named a HP vice president and director of HP Labs in the same year. In 1986, Birnbaum was named general manager of the Information Technology Group. He was responsible for the development of all core hardware platforms and systems software for the Precision Architecture product line.

After the first successful shipment of these systems in 1988, he was named general manager of the new Information Architecture Group, which developed systems architectures for cooperative-computing environments. This became the basis for HP's open client server system products. In 1991, he was elected senior vice president of R&D and director of HP Laboratories. In this role, as a member of the Management Staff, he was responsible for coordinating HP's global research and development, directing central research, and acting as the technology spokesman for the company.

Birnbaum was born in the Bronx, N.Y. He holds a bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and master's and doctoral degrees in nuclear physics from Yale University in New Haven, Conn.

He has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Inc., a Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology, and a member of the Association of Computing Machinery. He has been granted an honorary doctorate by the Technion University of Israel. Birnbaum's board memberships include the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the Technion University of Israel, Multimedia Medical Systems, the Euphrat Museum of Art, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. He also serves on advisory councils at Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley.