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

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Sep 20, 2013, 12:37 ET

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.

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"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 Management 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.

About Carnegie Mellon University: Carnegie Mellon (www.cmu.edu) is a private, internationally ranked research university with programs in areas ranging from science, technology and business, to public policy, the humanities and the arts. More than 12,000 students in the university's seven schools and colleges benefit from a small student-to-faculty ratio and an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation. A global university, Carnegie Mellon's main campus in the United States is in Pittsburgh, Pa. It has campuses in California's Silicon Valley and Qatar, and programs in Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe and Mexico.