Illinois alumni Magazine

For UI researchers, homeland security is a series of complex systems within a series of complex systems.

By Mary Timmins

At the far southwest corner of the campus of the University of Illinois lies the kingdom of the Illinois Fire Service Institute – a crazy kingdom, with a village of buildings that have been scorched, collapsed and otherwise turned upside down, and a command post where awards and citations and all manner of honors line corridors busy with men and women whose business is saving lives. This is the kingdom of Richard Jaehne, a retired Marine Corps officer who has ruled the FSI since 1992.

On many days, Jaehne can be found in hard hat and golf cart, riding around Rescue City (as the upended village is known), observing the teams of firefighter trainees who get worked hard there, putting out blazes and using ropes and gear to extract limp dummies from tricky places. On other days, he switches out the hard hat for a bow tie and heads off to Springfield or Chicago or D.C. for meetings at the many agencies on many different levels with which the job of keeping people safe involves him.

“It’s the fundamental land-grant university mission in the 21st century,” he is wont to say and say again. “Having a safe community in Illinois.”

Demands on Jaehne have toughened up since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists slammed planes into New York City and the Pentagon, killing thousands. That toughening – the pressure to protect American people and places under the rapidly donned national rubric of homeland security – has put the FSI at the center of the University’s interdisciplinary hunt for ways to make the world safer, a hunt that ranges through mathematics, engineering, information science and veterinary medicine and touches areas as diverse as kinesiology, psychology and linguistics. As terrorist threats have evolved in the widening zone of years since 9/11, becoming at once more personal and more diffuse, problems of safety and security are proliferating along the perimeters of technology and infrastructure, from borders and airports to computer networks and power grids. Yet perhaps most compelling of all are the natural events – the tornadoes, the earthquakes, the fires, the floods – with the power to send Illinois communities catawampus in the manner of Rescue City but on a much bigger scale. From Jaehne’s standpoint, all of life might as well have a big sign on it that reads: PROTECTION NEEDED HERE.

Protection – along with prevention, response and recovery – being the raison d’être of FSI, Jaehne is actively pursuing the concept of a center for public safety at Illinois that leverages the University’s strengths both in research and service (the latter including not only FSI but the Police Training Institute). “A cross between policy and training” is how Jaehne envisions the future center, “between a responder mode and the resources of the University.”

The uber-challenge in public safety is the complexity of what people do and where and how they do it, obliging researchers to tease out the systems within the systems within the systems that make up institutions and communities and events. From figuring out ways to help firefighters better deal with heat and stress (as kinesiology professor Steve Petruzzello does) to improving standards for railroad tank cars that carry chlorine, ammonia and other hazardous chemicals (the work of civil engineer Chris Barkan) to the quest for airport security that is at once less intrusive and more effective (a cause célèbre for computer scientist Sheldon Jacobson), researchers at Illinois visit problems of protection not just in space but time – which is to say, guarding lives by seeing how events unfold.

“Nine out of 10 people saved in an incident are saved by the people who were there at the time,” Jaehne observed. “Saving the other 10 percent is – real hard.”
           
Well to the north of the Fire Service Institute, Sean Meyn sits in his office in the U of I’s Coordinated Science Lab, where he can overlook the green swath that is the Beckman Quad and ponder the problem of egress. Egress is the same problem pondered by firefighters who have to get people out of burning buildings, though they’ve got a lot less response time than Meyn. A computer scientist and mathematician, Meyn specializes in complex systems, and his research subjects have ranged from networks for wireless communications to how electrical energy gets moved around the power grid. Now, he’s taking a hard look at ways to get panicky people out of burning buildings. Dealing with these dynamics is “a new area and an old area,” said Meyn, who is studying such solutions as how to accurately count the number of people actually in a structure that’s on fire and “smart” P.A. systems and signage that will give those people the right advice on how to get out. As with his other work, Meyn’s essential quest is to reduce the critical problems of uncertainty indigenous to complex systems.

Meyn is one in the elite coterie of faculty with appointments in the Information Trust Institute, established at Illinois in 2003 to address the huge problem of protecting information in an information age, where communication is increasingly mediated by technology. “Humans have developed over thousands of years a sense of how much they can trust one another, human to human,” explained Bill Sanders, the computer engineer who leads ITI and is charged with the enormous mission of translating trustworthiness into bytes. ITI projects engage UI faculty from disciplines as diverse as aerospace engineering, law and speech and hearing science. Projects range from Himanshu Khurana’s study of regional and national power grids, using a simulator to show how and where attacks could overload power lines and create blackouts; to data analysis by Jiawei Han, who is looking at airspace violations and other anomalies so as to improve aviation safety; to work by Dušan Stipanovi on un-manned rescue vehicles for accidents and disasters.

The most fraught security challenges in cyberland stem from the tension between complexity and accessibility in the computer systems on which academic life – not to mention the business and even social worlds – depends. How do we share information and yet keep it – and ourselves – safe? For Von Welch ’92 eng and Randy Butler, who work in conjunction with ITI at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the question about cyber attacks is not “when?” but “how and how big?”

“Attacks are almost constant and ongoing,” said Welch, who, in his decade and a half at NCSA, has seen cyber villains morph from precocious teen hackers into world-class spies and criminals who are good at breaking and entering in cyberspace and even better at staying hidden once they get inside a system. While every computer user, from stay-at-home moms to multinational corporations, needs firewalls and anti-virus protection, NCSA is far beyond the domestic security front, acting as a sort of Texas Ranger along the high-tech frontiers of Internet interconnectedness. “NCSA provides computing resources to scientists and engineers who are all over the country,” Welch said. “We don’t have a closed set of users – like a company – that we can just put behind a firewall.” Welch and Butler have gotten so good at what they do that guys in the FBI have taken to dropping by NCSA for seminars in cyber security. The pair has also developed a flash drive that crime scene investigators can use to download and preserve information from computers on which suspicious activity may have taken place.

Towering far above even the most complex computer networks, though, are the vast systems of information that gave rise to computers to begin with – the imbricate, infinite, self-organizing mess that is human communication. Drawing on disciplines as wide-ranging as linguistics, information theory and analytical philosophy, Dan Roth, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, is working on higher-order search tools (like Google on steroids) that will enable computers to make sense of language in ways that people do, through inference and context. “About 85 percent of all information organizations deal with is unstructured,” he said. “Our goal is to make sense of this information.” Roth’s tools are being used by researchers at Jackson State University to track local media’s coverage of disease outbreaks. Ultimately, this method could be extended to Web sites, blogs and other public domain information sources to detect outbreaks in the very early stages. “The gap between what we can do with this technology and what people are doing with it now,” said Roth, “is about 10 years.”

Alas for first responders, their best work tends to be in terms of the next 10 minutes rather than the next 10 years.

Think of how an outbreak, whether of fever or fire or terror, reaches critical mass and starts to spread. The system of the response to the event has a curious affinity with the system of the event itself. Information rises until it provokes a reaction. This reaction in turn goes up a chain, from people at the scene, through fire and police departments and other local agencies, and on, if the event is catastrophic, to the state and federal levels. Jack Herrmann ’76 VM, DVM ’78, MPH ’03 (UIC), knows a lot about this process from the standpoint of public health. In a recent two-day functional exercise that he and a team of faculty colleagues from the College of Veterinary Medicine hosted at the U of I, members from the Illinois Department of Public Health and other state agencies were presented with a fictitious threat – evidenced by “cases” of bloody diarrhea in a six-county area – which turned out to be caused by deliberate contamination by a fictional employee at a fictional cheese factory. “Everyone had to respond appropriately and go down the right path to invocation of the food emergency response program,” said Herrmann, who noted that subjects of other exercises might include viral and bacterial outbreaks, animal diseases, and food and environmental contamination by poisons and biological agents.

Since animals are robust vectors for viruses and bacterial infections, the field of veterinary medicine has hurtled to a central role in a globalizing world whose inhabitants are growing ever more exposed to one another’s illnesses. UI zoonotic disease specialist Dan Rock is leading a research project, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and located in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, to set up stations that will monitor for outbreaks including what he terms “the biggies and baddies of the animal world,” such as foot-and-mouth disease, avian influenza and swine flu. While such illnesses have been effectively eradicated in the U.S. and Europe, the developing world is a potent source for their resurgence, whether as naturally occurring outbreaks or bioterrorist weapons. The data promised by this unprecedented research “will revolutionize how we think about human and animal health,” Rock predicted.

“We could be breaking completely new ground.”

While worries about deliberate biological and chemical contamination, as well as hijacking, bombings and other terrorist crimes, lurk on the dark edges of the national psyche, Mother Nature would actually seem to be much better armed than most radical groups. Indeed, though jet-propelled by the terrors of 9/11, the mission of homeland security in the U.S. is built on the commitment to dealing with all hazards. “Most threats are naturally occurring,” observed Jaehne. And he ought to know, having spent 40 years among the shock and awe – not to mention the politics – of furthering security and emergency preparedness, first as a Marine Corps career officer and since as director of the Fire Service Institute. The elements are downright dangerous. Look at what earth, water, fire and air can do when they’re in a bad mood.

Right now, there’s a lot of attention at the U of I (and elsewhere) centered on the earthquake as the event most likely to get christened The Big One for the Midwest. Illinois and her neighboring states were awakened – literally – to this possibility early on the morning of last April 18, when an earthquake with a Richter scale magnitude of 5.2 shook sleepers in, among other places, Champaign-Urbana, then rumbled on to locales as distant as Atlanta; Omaha, Neb.; and Green Bay, Wis. That the quake emanated from the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone, rather than the far more unstable New Madrid Seismic Zone, was not exactly comforting. The last major seismic event in the NMSZ took place in the winter of 1811-12, with quakes that registered up to 8.2 on the Richter scale. (It is worth noting that each whole integer on the scale marks a tenfold increase in the earthquake’s intensity.) Scientists have been worrying about another such event for a while.

“The Midwest is shockingly unprepared,” said Amr Elnashai, the civil engineer who heads the Mid-America Earthquake Center at the U of I, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and one of three such centers in the U.S. “A 7.7 earthquake would be like a few hundred nuclear bombs going off at the same time.” While hurricanes show up on radar and tornadoes can be watched for from towers, earthquakes are rather more inconsiderate in the matter of advance warning. Rapid response is thus especially dependent on planning. MAE and NCSA have developed MAEviz, an open-source, easily updated computer program that uses earthquake data to model and predict potential damage to infrastructure, including buildings, bridges, transportation systems and gas, water and power lines, as well as injuries, deaths and the host of other effects earthquakes can wreak. Research is concentrated on eight central states (Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama), with special emphasis on Memphis and St. Louis. Since both cities are at high risk in the event of a major earthquake along the New Madrid Fault, MAE Center predictions are being used to draw regional and national response plans for staging, rescue, evacuation, relief and temporary housing.

While research led by UI civil engineering professor Jerry Hajjar is testing a system to improve the way steel-framed structures respond to seismic events, the earthquake-proof buildings now standard in California are still in the Midwest’s future – probably because the country’s midsection hasn’t been hit like its West Coast has, at least in modern times. Yet, the New Madrid region is among the most seismically volatile in the U.S. Particularly disturbing is the proximity of the Mississippi River, which could, in the event of a major quake, cause widespread liquefaction – a phenomenon in which the earth goes quicksand-soupy, and life as we know it starts to welter into endless acres of muck.

This is devastation that the tumbled rubble of the Fire Service Institute’s Rescue City cannot even begin to approximate – though, to be sure, it’s on director Jaehne’s mind. Earthquake is “the No. 1 potential natural disaster in Illinois,” he said. “We deal with preparing teams for the aftermath.

“The problem is figuring out what you need and where you need it.”

And that’s the problem, endlessly reshaped and expressed, that tops the apocalyptic to-do list that is homeland security, a list encompassing the many natural and unnatural shocks the flesh is heir to, from bombers and hackers to epidemics and earthquakes.

It’s easy for most of us to regard these events and possibilities in an uneasy half-light, as part of a “can’t-happen-here” dreamscape, and to hope that whatever preparedness we can muster will be enough should the worst (or, rather, one worst from a whole range of worsts) happen.

For Jaehne, though, and for the faculty whose work in various aspects of homeland security can be shaped into a kind of rough map of the Urbana campus, each problem on the list is a complex system begetting another system of solutions – solutions that then flow into the world, as streams feed a river. Such is the huge, scary, fascinating and ultimately indeterminate task of keeping the country safe – with some help from the University of Illinois.