“This is not science for science’s sake. This is science for saving lives, for improving our response capability, for training future emergency responders, or analysts, or engineers to keep that whole philosophy in mind,” says Dr. Jan van Aart, an associate professor in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science (CIS). This is his philosophy, and the driving force behind a project he helped create: that the things academics create must be useful. “I should always design a system with the user in mind,” he says.

In spite of its name, the Information Products Lab for Emergency Response (IPLER) is not a lab. It’s a multifaceted project that makes the step between what technology can do and what emergency responders need. It began with a National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation between RIT and the University of Buffalo back in 2009. The partnership combines the resources and researchers of the RIT Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Laboratory in the Chester F. Carlson Center fo Imaging Science (CIS) with the Department of Geography at Buffalo.

IPLER’s project manager, Don McKeown, is a researcher for the CIS. Before the project began in 2009, he developed the Wildfire Airborne Sensing Program. A sensor that can be bolted onto a plane and used for mapping large areas, the program is a pivotal part of IPLER. The project’s science principle investigator, van Aardt mainly studies forestry, focusing on remote sensing. The other main sensor he uses is LiDAR, a police radar-like device that can be used to make 3-D maps of the ground. First, a laser emits infrared light in pulses; then a sensor picks up the light when it returns. From this time difference, it can calculate how far away it is from the ground.

According to van Aardt, the lab uses LiDAR for digital elevation modeling, which analyses the effect of factors such as ground location and shape on things such as water flow. The project uses it for flood modeling and mapping, as well as building damage assessment. “We know roughly what a roof looks like, or what it should look like,” says van Aardt. “So if an earthquake moves through, we can use all of these million points on the ground and look for cracks in the roof.” He adds, “We can use [LiDAR] for debris assessment, like in the case of Haiti, [by seeing how much] junk in between the buildings.”

IPLER goes beyond mapping damaged areas. It starts even before disaster strikes, by using remote sensing to understand high-risk areas. Then it aids in the response to disasters by mapping floods, fires, earthquakes and more, while relaying that information to the ground in near-real time. Then, in the weeks after a disaster, IPLER can continue to fly its WASP and LiDAR sensors over the area to monitor progress and possibly evaluate the best place to safeguard refugees while their homes recover. In this way, IPLER is comprehensive in its disaster management.

IPLER is dedicated to usability of their products and data. They want to be able to give their programs to emergency responders and say, “You don’t have to know the physics behind what’s happening, but you can use this tool: you can ingest the LiDAR data, you can click on this button, maybe set the building size parameter, and you can get out an approximate building damage assessment map,” according to van Aardt. Computer programming is an integral part of IPLER, not just in writing algorithms for their equipment and data processing, but also in making their user interfaces as efficient and understandable as possible.

IPLER has been implemented for its share of disasters already. When a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti Sunday, January 12, 2010, the project was contracted by ImageCat Inc., an IPLER partner, to fly over the island. They covered 250 square miles in seven days, and they made all of their maps public domain data. Since then, IPLER has flown for New York state after hurricane Irene and tropical storm Lee, with Tomnod after the New Zealand earthquake, and for the U.S. Geological Survey in data analysis after the Japanese earthquake last spring.

Jason Faulring, a CIS systems integration engineer, pilots the aircraft that holds the sensors. “Without Jason, this is not possible, literally,” says van Aardt. “Don and I can keel over and someone else can step in, but if we lose Jason then we’re in trouble.” Jason supplies some of the technical expertise behind IPLER’s missions.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security asked IPLER to research nuclear ingestion pathway mapping. This involved developing a way to rapidly assess crop damage caused by the fallout of a nuclear reactor meltdown. They use satellite data over many years to develop a baseline map. Then, in the case of a disaster, IPLER would again fly over an area and take images, classifying areas based on how the images have changed relative to their baseline map.

According to van Aardt, the project has three short term goals: to deliver usable information to disaster responders, to educate themselves and others on the disaster process, and to demonstrate what is possible. Ultimately, the IPLER team wants to sustain the project as long as possible, and one of McKeown’s jobs is to look for grants to sustain their research. They are confident this project will save lives in years to come, as it educates and trains the next generation of disaster responders about how to use the most recent science and technology.

This project is putting RIT on the map, so to speak, when it comes to disaster management. The project has, and is continuing, to network with both private and public sector emergency responders. McKeown and van Aardt see IPLER as a sort of middleman between two groups that otherwise wouldn’t be able to communicate as effectively: technical experts and emergency responders. IPLER is only able to save lives by developing trust with technology companies and disaster responders alike — and it does just that.

van Aardt believes the IPLER philosophy of practicality can be applied across all domains, especially the sciences. “I think we as imaging scientists lose sight of this: whatever we do needs to be transferable to an end user,” he says. “That doesn’t mean we have to dumb it down … we just have to make it understandable.” In the case of IPLER, this usable technology saves lives.

To learn more about the IPLER project, visit their website.