SBIR Phase II: An Emergency Notification System for Delivering Geo-Targeted Information-Rich Web Alerts

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will extend the successful findings of Phase I of the project to investigate the technical feasibility of an innovative emergency notification system that delivers emergency alerts to people over the web. The proposed activity involves advancing technical knowledge in the areas of network edge applications and HTTP traffic processing. With the web having a large audience and increasingly becoming a source of multimedia infotainment, its appeal as an emergency notification channel, in the same vein as TV and radio, has grown, especially given its potential for delivering detailed and customized information. The objective of the proposed research is to complete a network edge application that introduces web alerts to web-users, without requiring any special client-side software installation or web-user registration. The effort will extend the work performed in Phase I to technically mature two key system components: 1) a network appliance component hosting a network edge application that applies innovative HTTP processing algorithms to web traffic to introduce the alert in a controlled fashion and without unnecessarily disrupting the web-user?s browsing; and 2) a centralized control component. The product from the proposed effort will have the potential of enhancing the emergency notification capability and effectiveness at campuses, which in turn bolsters emergency preparedness and response efforts, potentially saving lives during life-threatening emergencies. The long-term plan is to extend the deployment of the product to the general public, thus extending the emergency-related societal benefit to the general public.