Carnegie Mellon University
September 19, 2013

Media Advisory: Carnegie Mellon's Silicon Valley Campus To Participate in California Emergency Preparedness Event

Contact: Chriss Swaney / 412-268-5776 / swaney@andrew.cmu.edu
     
Event: Students and researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus will showcase novel technologies for emergency preparedness at the 2013 Palo Alto Quakeville, an event designed to help coastal communities better prepare for earthquakes.

"This is an excellent opportunity to showcase some of our novel work, including our Survivable Social Networks (SSN), and to work to integrate our technologies into emergency systems already in place within many of our California communities," said Bob Iannucci, associate dean of the College of Engineering and director of the CMU Silicon Valley campus.

Iannucci said the SSN project aims to help communities in disaster situations to re-establish communications by providing a network of small nodes, each installed and maintained by regular citizens in their own neighborhoods. Each node provides neighbors with social networking communications on their smartphones, and ultimately neighborhood nodes will allow users to find the status of family members, report damages, provide help to neighbors and to get updates from the city, schools and other organizations.

A CMU Silicon Valley student team will provide demos of the SSN Web app and will work with Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members to evaluate SSN's effectiveness. Team members include Rui Hu, Briana Johnson, Xinfeng Le and Yuki Nishida — all master's degree students in the Information Networking Institute's Information Technology program.
 
The CMU SSN project developed as an outgrowth of CMU Silicon Valley's Disaster Mangement Initiative. The SSN project is sponsored by the city of Palo Alto and the San Jose Water Company. 
 
When: Noon to 4 p.m., Saturday, Sept 21
 
Where: Cubberly Community Center, 4000 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, Calif. 94306.

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