Rutgers University Symposium on Homeland Security Research

September 23, 2003
DIMACS Center, CoRE Building, Rutgers University

Organizer:
Fred Roberts, Chair, RUHSRI and Director, DIMACS, froberts@dimacs.rutgers.edu
Program Committee:
Margaret Brennan, Chair, Cook College
Nabil Adam, CIMIC
Stanley Dunn, SOE
Richard Mammone, CAIP
Robert Snyder, EOHSI
Presented by Rutgers University Homeland Security Research Initiative (RUHSRI).

Nabil Adam and Vijay Atluri, CIMIC, Rutgers University

Title: Home Land Security Research at CIMIC

CIMIC's work on border control is aimed at providing decision makers around the country with the ability to extract and fuse information from multiple sources in response to a query while operating under a decentralized security administration. This work is performed in close collaboration with US Customs. Methodologies and tools will be developed to better target shipments to be inspected.

With EPA involvement and endorsement of NJ's Domestic Security Preparedness Task Force, CIMIC established the first regional water security consortium in the nation, focusing on development of a prototype early warning system(EWS). An important complement to the EWS is a surveillance monitoring system that focuses on public health surveillance of disease data in the population to identify outbreaks and sickness should a covert chemical or biological attack occur in a U.S. drinking water system.

Work in GIS through the Meadowlands Environmental Research Institute helps police and fire departments in 14 municipalities in emergency situations.

Funding: $3.3M. from NSF and EPA
Industrial Partners: IBM, SAP, American Waterworks Co.
Government Partners: NJ DEP, NJ Meadowlands Commission, Passaic
Valley Water Commission and North Jersey District Water Supply Commission, US Customs.


Vijay Atluri, CIMIC, Rutgers University

Title: Secure Agency Interoperation for Effective Data Mining in Border Control and Homeland Security Applications (Poster Presentation)

This work is aimed at providing decision makers around the country with the ability to extract and fuse information from multiple sources in response to a query while operating under a decentralized security administration. The system will utilize data available from different agencies, ports and customs divisions to supplement the profiling by targeting towards anomalies, and detect various flags raised by non-conforming shipments or abnormal behavior of inbound cargos and raise a combination of alerts. This also helps to identify the anomalous shipments before they even enter the country. This work is performed in close collaboration with US Customs.


Vijay Atluri, CIMIC, Rutgers University

Title: End to End Early Warning Decision Support System for Dinking Water Safety and Security (Poster Presentation)

The objective of the early warning system (EWS) is to to detect deliberate or accidental introduction of chemical, biological and radiological contaminants into a distribution system as well as into source water systems. It is accomplished by way of first placing the appropriate sensors, modeling the behavior of the level and extent of the threats and developing a decision support system to generate warnings and alerts. An important complement to the EWS is a surveillance monitoring system that focuses on public health surveillance of disease data in the population to identify outbreaks and sickness should a covert chemical or biological attack occur in a U.S. drinking water system.


Vijay Atluri, CIMIC, Rutgers University

Title: Interconnected Municipal Information for Home Land Security (Poster Presentation)

The Fourteen Municipalities in Northern New Jersey are being interconnected on-line to share and update spatial information for the purposes of planning sustainable development and Home Land Security. The system benefits 490,000 residents through a centralized data repository that can be updated within a multi-user environment. Available datasets include government buildings, police stations, firehouses, hospitals, building footprints etc. The system is intended for first responders such as fireman, police and Emergency Medical Services (EMS). The system will handle information needs for scenarios such as: locating known hazardous material storage sites, establishing the demographics of affected areas, locating hospitals, shelters and names of affected property owners.


Brian Buckley, P. Lioy and Robert Snyder, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute

Title: Information wall technology for crisis management of a biological or chemical weapon attack

Crisis management during any even requires good planning and reliable information that is readily available to help in making critical decisions. Having that information during an attack by terrorists using biological or chemical weapon becomes especially important because the amount of time spent gathering such information may lead to additional loss of lives. Specifically, providing the decision makers with information on primary route of exposure, reactivity, medical intervention protocols source and direction of the agents movement as well as the geographical areas likely to experience the greatest loss of life, is one of the keys to good crisis management. Working with Quantum Leap Technologies, investigators at EOHSI have created an interactive format, termed an "information wall", which can receive data from remote sensors which identify and quantify the agent of concern. The wall has the capability to verify the composition of the agent, create a model of the plume using feedback data to modify the model as needed, make use of the USEPA AEGL data base for risk assessment, predict direction of the plume and potential health impacts at remote sites, deal with all toxicological and medical issues, protect emergency responders, and control the locations upon which impact will occur during the time of impact and in the post-impact period, and recommend remediation. Compilations of much of the available literature as well as modeling of an agents behavior are just part of the value added items that are an integral part of this information wall that also has a great potential for training crisis management personnel.


Charles Cheung, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Title: Bio/chem agent detection and decontamination technology

In this talk, bioaerosol detection challenge is reviewed and a promising technology is emphasized. In addition, bio/chem agent decontamination by non-thermal atmospheric pressure plasma is discussed. The ideal combination of plasma characteristic identified. A possible application in emergency personal protection will be illustrated.


Ahmed Elgammal, Dept. of Computer Science

Title: Realtime Visual Surveillance and Human Motion Analysis (Poster Presentation)

In automated surveillance systems, cameras and other sensors are typically used to monitor activities at a site with the goal of automatically understanding events happening at the site. Automatic event understanding would enable functionalities such as detection of suspicious activities, site security, etc. Current systems archive huge volumes of video for eventual off-line human inspection. Automatic detection of events in videos would facilitate efficient archiving and automatic annotation. It could be used to direct the attention of human operators to potential problems. Automatic detection of events would also dramatically reduce the bandwidth required for video transmission and storage as only interesting pieces would need to be transmitted or stored.

Higher level understanding of events requires certain lower level computer vision tasks to be performed such as the detection of unusual motion, tracking of targets, labeling of body parts, understanding interactions between people, gesture recognition, etc. This poster will cover our research on many of these fundamental building blocks necessary to achieve an automated visual surveillance systems.


Mark Frank, Rutgers School of Communication, Information and Library Studies

Title: Deception, Digitization, and Counter-terror

This talk will concern identifying reliable markers in human behavior for threats or deception in high stakes terrorism situations, and whether digital-based systems might prove helpful in these efforts.


Scott Glenn, IMCS, Rutgers University

Title: Development of a Dual-Use Over-The-Horizon Radar Network for Monitoring Ocean Currents and Ship Traffic in the Exclusive Economic Zone (Talk and Poster Presentation)

Advances in ocean observing technology and numerical modeling are fueling new Federal initiatives that are expected to double the annual Federal investment in oceanography by the end of the decade. A core component of the new initiatives is to establish a sustained coastal ocean observation network for the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). A key technology for the envisioned national network are shore-based High Frequency (HF) Radar remote sensing systems capable of over-the-horizon mapping of surface currents. Rutgers currently operates ten of these HF Radar systems covering the region from Cape May to Cape Cod. The hourly surface current maps are used by academics for scientific research and teaching, by the Coast Guard for search and rescue, by the NOAA HazMat Response Team for oil spills, and by the general public for recreation. Rutgers attended the first meeting to design a similar network for the entire United States at the Ocean.US office in Washington, DC on September 11, 2003.

Efforts to establish a national HF Radar network are enhanced by its potential dual-use capabilities, the foremost of which is surface vessel tracking for homeland defense. While conventional microwave Radars offer excellent line-of-sight coverage of vessels at short range, homeland defense initiatives have identified over-the-horizon tracking of surface vessels as a priority to extend the borders of our nation's harbors out to the edge of the EEZ. In response, Rutgers University has formed a team of academic/industry partners to develop and test surface vessel detection and tracking algorithms within Rutgers' existing HF Radar array deployed outside the tier 1 Port of New York and New Jersey. Start up funding has been provided by the Office of Naval Research and the DoD Counterdrug Technology Development Office, and tests are being conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Coast Guard. Initial results include the automated detection and tracking of a large container vessel, an academic research vessel, a mid-size Coast Guard cutter, and a small commercial SeaTow vessel. The initial results are sufficiently promising to lead the organizers of the national HF Radar network to anticipate that funding for vessel tracking applications will quickly outpace funding for oceanographic applications if continued development is pursued.


Panos Georgopoulos, EOHSI

Title: Homeland Security Research at the EOHSI Center for Exposure and Risk Modeling (CERM)

Homeland security related research at the EOHSI Center for Exposure and Risk Modeling (CERM) aims to develop, evaluate and refine computational tools for characterizing population exposures and doses associated with chemical and biological agents released during emergency events.

These computational tools include:

(a) predictive environmental and biological models for contaminant release, transport, and fate, based on physicochemical principles, for phenomena taking place over multiple spatial (e.g. regional, urban, local, neighborhood, microenvironmental, personal, organ/tissue) and temporal (e.g. seconds to weeks) scales;

(b) integrated exposure information systems that dynamically link the above models with comprehensive databases and Geographic Information Systems characterizing the relevant environments/microenvironments (via e.g. meteorology, hydrogeology, land use and cover, building properties, etc.) and populations (via demographic attributes, activity patterns, etc.).

Examples of currently on-going homeland security relatedprojects at CERM include:

- Evaluation of existing environmental fate/transport models for their applicability and limitations in emergency situations.

- Modeling studies of emergency events (such as fires) at or near nuclear and hazardous waste facilities.

- Development of prototype source-to-dose modeling systems for characterizing multipathway exposures to chemical and biological warfare agents.

- Reconstruction of population exposures to the contaminants released from the fires and collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001, to provide analyses of lessons learned and to support a variety of health impact studies.

- Development and application of computationally efficient "model/data fusion" techniques for real-time (i) inverse problem solution (source characterization), (ii) Bayesian real-time model "calibration", and (iii) uncertainty characterization and reduction.

- Analysis and optimization of spatiotemporal contaminant monitoring network designs.

- Development of protocols for hospital personnel response to emergency events involving chemical warfare agents.

Funding for the above activities is provided by USEPA, NIEHS, USDOE, USDOD's ONR through QLI, the VA, and NJDEP.


Amy Marie Keller, Sinuk Kang, Belida Uckun, Maggie Herbasz, SCILS, Rutgers University

Title: Microexpression Recognition: Training Coast Guard Senior Investigators and Other Populations (Poster Presentation)

This study explores the potential to train laypeople, law enforcement and military officials to recognize facial microexpressions. Microexpressions are facial movements that may last only a fraction of a second, yet are typically difficult or impossible to mask, as they seem to be Darwinian responses to emotion. It may be possible to apply our findings to the detection of deception.


Leslie Kennedy, Rutgers Center for the Study of Public Security

Title: Research and Policy Development at the Rutgers Center for the Study of Public Security

The Rutgers Center for the Study of Public Security (RCSPS), founded as the Center for the Study of Terrorism, is an interdisciplinary collaboration of the institutions, faculty, and graduate students on the Newark campus. The RCSPS' primary objective is the academic study of public security: including the roots and dissemination of terrorism; consequences of response; and the ways in which democratic societies effectively can manage change. Completing its first full year of operations, the Center is building an outreach program whose foundation includes complementing the research mission of the Center; and establishing Rutgers Newark as a neutral forum for multi-disciplinary education, problem analysis and problem solving. Central to the research and outreach mission of RCSPS is the collaboration among life scientists, social scientists, lawyers, IT experts, industry and others who are focused on this issue. Partners include the School of Criminal Justice (SCJ), School of Law, College of Nursing, Center for Global Change and Governance (CGCG), and the Center for Information Management, Integration and Connectivity (CIMIC) and their subsidiary organizations, such as the Police Institute at SCJ, the research program on Border Control and Homeland Security of the CGCG, and the Nursing Center for Bioterrorism and Infectious Diseases Preparedness. The RCSPS Advisory Council has representatives from Verizon, PSE&G, US Congress, the military, PHRI, Newark Provost and others. RCSPS includes among its collaborators in Health Security in New Jersey: the PHRI, Prudential Financial, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, and The Fund for New Jersey.

The RCSPS' primary objective is the academic study of public security, including the roots and dissemination of terrorism and the ways in which democratic societies effectively stop and cope with its consequences. Other areas include the consequences of heightened security and how traditional practices and relationships designed to ensure public security are changing in the aftermath of the events of September 11. Completing its first full year of operations, the Center is building an outreach program whose foundation includes:

The Center's agenda for the coming year will be to begin to understand the impact of security decisions generally but also upon the institutions they seek to strengthen. In addition, we hope to understand the consequences of those decisions in terms of broader questions of how we are adapting to and managing change and conflict. In the initiatives planned for the coming year, we hope to address the following questions. Our major focus to date has been on the coincidence of law enforcement, corporate security, and health security. In terms of these areas, we address the following questions.


Aparna Krishnamoorthy, Anand Doshi and Robert Utama, CAIP Center

Title: Enhancing the Performance of Face Recognition Systems (Poster Presentation)

Face detection, recognition and tracking systems can be crucial elements in combating terrorism. Tests of these systems in natural environments, such as border crossings and airports, showed that there is still a long way to go, if robust performance in large volume applications is to be achieved. Much wider variations in illumination, pose, scale, motion and appearance between the collection of the gallery images in the database and the probe images must be accommodated, if face processing systems are going to be practical. This project involves a program of research in the area of preprocessing faces, using adaptive signal recovery and restoration concepts, with the goal of improving the performance of both face detection/tracking/registration systems and face recognition systems.


Felissa R. Lashley and Marie O'Toole, Rutgers College of Nursing

Title: Nursing Center for Bioterrorism and Infectious Disease Preparedness at the Rutgers College of Nursing (Talk and Poster)

The Rutgers College of Nursing has the Nursing Center for Bioterrorism and Infectious Disease Preparedness. The main objectives for the Nursing Center are: 1) Create a strategic plan to assure the availability of a well-prepared nursing workforce in the event of an emergency or attack; 2) Provide information, consultation and technical assistance to nurses and allied nursing personnel related to bioterrorism and emerging infectious diseases preparedness; 3) Develop continuing education programs at basic, intermediate and advanced level for all nursing personnel; 4) Develop a website with up to date links on topics relevant to nursing in this area; 5) Collaborate with other disciplines and entities; 6) Create a clearinghouse for nursing materials including a resource manual for nurses; and 7) Develop and test best nursing practices in this area.


Yicheng Lu, WINLAB

Title: ZnO-based Multifunctional and Tunable Sensors

ZnO is a wide band gap semiconductor with a direct energy bandgap of 3.3 eV at room temperature. Furthermore, ZnO can be alloyed with CdO and MgO to form the ternaries CdxZn1-xO and MgxZn1-xO, extending the direct energy band from 2.8eV to 4.0eV. Through proper doping, ZnO can be made transparent and conductive, semiconducting, piezoelectric, ferroelectric, or ferromagnetic. It is possible to use ZnO based multilayer structures to design and construct completely new integrated sensor devices with multi-functionality and tunability for homeland security.

In this talk, recent research results of ZnO material properties, and sensor device will be presented. The ZnO-based UV sensors, novel monolithically integrated tunable surface acoustic wave (MITSAW) chip-based multifunctional sensors, and the emerging ZnO nanostructured biosensors will also be discussed.

Dr. Lu is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a graduate faculty member in the Department of Ceramics and Materials Engineering. His early research was involved metal semiconductor contacts, and rapid thermal processing for compound semiconductor materials. Since he joined Rutgers University, Dr. Lu's research includes MEMS-based Si vacuum microelectronics, high speed and high contrast MQW light modulators, piezoelectric thin films and devices, and integrated RF passive devices. His recent research has been focused on ZnO based materials, nanostructures, and multi-functional devices. Dr. Lu has over 130 refereed articles, 170 conference presentations and invited talks, and 7 U.S. patents. Dr. Lu received the 1993 Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching, which is the highest teaching award at Rutgers. In 1994 he received the Board of Trustees Research Fellowship award for Scholarly Excellence from Rutgers University. In 2002, he received the Rutgers University Scholar-Teacher Award. Dr. Lu received the IEEE Outstanding Student Counselor and Advisor Award in 1995.


David Madigan, DIMACS and the Department of Statistics

Title: The DIMACS Working Group on Adverse Event and Disease Surveillance

This presentation will describe the activities of the DIMACS working group on adverse event and disease surveillance. This group involves over 50 epidemiologists, statisticians, computer scientists, and public health professionals, and focuses on analytic methods for surveillance. I will briefly describe some of these methods and current challenges.


Ali Maher and Hani Nassif, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Title: Security and Safety of our Critical Infrastructure

Our critical infrastructure sectors provide the goods and services that contribute to Nation's economy and the well being of its citizens. Critical infrastructure systems, which are the "engines" of our economic growth and development, constitute a major part of the national investment and are critical for the mobility of our society as well as its economic growth and prosperity. The U.S. has an estimated $25 trillion investment in civil infrastructure systems, including all installations that house, transport, transmit, and distribute people, goods, energy, resources, services and information. The Infrastructure system components such as bridges, highways, tunnels, traffic systems, road pavements, air- and seaports, dams, buildings, and other systems are considered assets that should be protected and properly managed. Natural deterioration due to aging of the infrastructure facilities along with increased demand for usage of services provided by infrastructure systems, and the risk of exposure to malicious disasters are major concerns for the Nation's infrastructure. The tragic events of 9/11 clearly showed how devastating such interruptions are in impeding economic growth and development. Consequently, the USA Patriot Act defined critical infrastructures as "Systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters."

This talk highlights the challenges in homeland security of the essential components of infrastructure systems and describes briefly CAIT's research projects related to maintenance, security, and safety of our critical infrastructure systems.


Richard Mammone, ECE and CAIP Wise Lab

Title: Warning and Indication Systems

The use of automatic monitoring systems to observe people and materials for indications of possible terrorist activities is of much interest today. The Rutgers University Warnings and Indicators System Engineering (WISE) Laboratory has developed systems to recognize people by their face or voice. In addition the WISE team have developed systems to identify explosives in airline baggage as well as systems to detect materials that could be used in the manufacturing of "dirty bombs". The various projects will be briefly reviewed and common issues arising in the design of warning and indicator systems will be presented.


Dimitris Metaxas and Rong Zhang, Computer Science

Title: Recognizing People from Gait (Recognition of human gait from video)

The objective of this work is to recognize human gait from video sequences. We have observed that each person's walking style can be characterized by the sagittal plane elevation angle (SPEA) history during the walking cycle. The SPEAs can be extracted from the video sequence though computer vision techniques. Based on the SPEA sequence, Hidden Markov Model is used for the recognition. In this talk, we will provide details of the algorithm and promising results.


S. Muthukrishnan, Computer Science

Title: Embedding Methods for Massive Data Sets and Their Applications

One of the biggest challenges in Monitoring and Surveillance is to process massive data, and mine for patterns. The Mathematics and Algorithms that is needed for this task is being developed at the MassDAL lab in the Computer Science department. In this talk, I will provide an overview of some of these methods, and discuss their applications in Homeland Security context.


Christine Podilchuk, CAIP

Title: Enhancing the Performance of Face Recognition Systems

We develop preprocessing algorithms for enhancing and restoring image data to improve the verification/identification performance of state-of-the-art face recognition systems. Current face recognition systems have been designed in fairly controlled environments where the training images and testing images are consistent in quality and variations in pose, expression, scale and lighting are limited. Ideal conditions are possible in a laboratory with trained personnel but in practice, the recognition systems may be subject to much greater variations in the training and testing data, resulting in degradation of recognition performance. Government funded research in face recognition over the last several years includes extensive testing of the different technologies which has helped identify remaining technical challenges to be addressed before face recognition technology can become widespread. These studies show that variation in outdoor illumination severely degrades the performance of all the recognition systems tested.

Our work is focused on improving current state-of-the-art technology with algorithms designed to preprocess the captured images before the face recognition step. The goal is to develop preprocessing algorithms which improve the performance any face recognition system when there is a mismatch between the training set and testing set due to image blur or variations in illumination. Image blur could be the result of motion blur, out-of-focus lenses, and varying image resolutions. While traditional image restoration/enhancement techniques are designed to improve visual quality, our goal is to improve the performance of standard face recognition systems without modifying the face recognition algorithms. We have found that traditional techniques aimed to improve visual quality are not necessarily effective at improving recognition performance. We describe the problems to be addressed, the technical challenges and show initial results on a commercial system.


Rose Puelle, Department of Entomology

Title: Food, Agriculture and Environmental Security

Cook College homeland security initiatives encompass plant, animal, insect and food safety research. These projects facilitate and integrate academic, industry and government collaborations. The Mosquito Research Unit's participation in the critical infrastructure response to Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus and West Nile virus provides an example of successful research-focused response to biological threats.


Dipankar Raychaudhuri, Professor ECE Dept & Director, WINLAB

Title: Rapidly deployable wireless networks for emergency communication and sensing applications

This talk presents a perspective on the use of wireless networking technologies for rapid deployment of emergency communications infrastructure. The "Infostations" radio concept is outlined, and a specific prototype implementation intended for "hot-spot" voice and data services is described. A more general self-organizing network concept with wireless hot-spots, multi-hop wireless routers and and radio sensors is then introduced, and results from related simulation and prototyping projects are briefly discussed.


Fred Roberts, DIMACS

Title: Homeland Security Research at DIMACS: Monitoring Message Streams and other Projects

This talk will briefly mention some of the homeland security research projects at DIMACS (The Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science) and then describe one of them, a project on monitoring message streams. The project seeks to advance the state of the art for filtering streams of text messages, and identifying those that are relevant to a given (already identified) topic or event. This problem is of great importance in forensic activities arising in homeland security surveillance.


David Robinson, New Jersey State Climatologist Center for Environmental Prediction Cook College/AES

Title: The New Jersey Weather and Climate Network: Harnessing Real-time Information for Homeland Security

The New Jersey Weather and Climate Network, or NJWxNet, is a comprehensive, statewide network of environmental monitoring stations provided through the Office of the New Jersey State Climatologist (ONJSC) at Rutgers University (http://climate.rutgers.edu/njwxnet) Real-time observations are provided from 50 ONJSC weather stations and over 50 stations from other networks distributed throughout New Jersey.

NJWxNet data and derived products provide a rich suite of environmental information to enhance the safety and security of lives and property in the Garden State. Having this information at the fingertips of decision makers will allow them to monitor hazardous conditions at a local level that has never before been available. No other single source of New Jersey weather information provides more timely, accurate and detailed observations as the NJWxNet. Having Rutgers scientists in charge of network operations ensures that decision makers receive the latest weather information coupled with homegrown expertise.

With a vulnerable population exceeding eight million inside of 8000 square miles, in an area that experiences five distinct climate zones, a reliable, dense observation network is necessary to reduce vulnerability and maximize security and operational efficiency. For instance, a radioactive release from the Salem nuclear plant in the southwest corner of NJ would have a major impact on the rest of the state on a sunny July day, with winds blowing from the southwest up through the state. This impact would be more severe to NJ residents than a wintertime release with a nor'easter producing stiff winds from the northeast. The impact on NJ residents would be reversed if a release occurred in New York City. NJWxNet products serve as critical baseline information for any operation or event, regardless of whether conditions are sunny or stormy.


Chada Ruengruglikit, Ho-Cheol Kim and Qingrong Huang, Department of Food Science and IBM Almaden Research Center

Title: Fabrication of nanoporous array for biosensor application (Poster Presentation)

Biosensors for biological warfare detection catch a lot of attentions since September 11th as these biological weapons can infect people even at low concentration. Since the present techniques and devices like cell-based assays have limitation in detection time and sensitivity, the more fast, reliable, specific and highly sensitive biosensors are of interest. Parallel detection of pathogens by DNA microarray technique is emerged to fulfill such requirement because it can discriminate target DNA sequences down to the level of single base mismatch. This method employs immobilization of the short oligonucleotide of toxin-encoding gene from bacteria onto surface-modified substrate by means of spotting technique and hybridization of these probe oligonucleotide with target DNA. However, the signal fidelity is the mostly found to be the big issue for sensitivity of array for this purpose. Thus, we proposed alternative substrate to increase signal intensity of array together with overcoming the high background problem by using nano-porous silica film as substrate for DNA-based array. Genomic DNA from Escherichia coli O157:H7 was used as target DNA and genomic DNA from Listeria monocytogenes was applied as negative control. The signal monitored by DNA microarray was shown to be enhanced due to the high density of oligonucleotides that were immobilized on the array. According to contact angle measured, optimization of the degree of hydrophilicity showed high potential to be a linker for other biospecies. Overall, we demonstrate the prospective of usinf this material as DNA chip for very sensitive, easy-to-use, and fast to detect and identify pathogenic bacteria.


Mona Sheikh, Ari Genauer, Robert Brangan, and Chia Wei Lee, School Of Engineering, Rutgers University

Title: Sensory Networks for Early Detection of Bio-Chemical Agents (Poster Presentation)

The project objective is to develop a physical and simulation model of Busch Campus on which a sensory network will be created for the detection of bio-chemical agents. By constructing a mathematical model, this project aims to define optimal sensor placement that will provide maximum coverage for the detection of bio-chemical agents, while minimizing false alarm and detection time.


Wade Trappe, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Title: New Challenges in Securing our Communication Infrastructure

The rapid adoption of wireless networking technologies is introducing new challenges for securing our communication infrastructure. In the future it is easy to envision low-cost, programmable, and disposable wireless devices that will allow non-expert adversaries to mount security threats that were not present in the conventional "wired" domain. In this talk, we will introduce some of the key challenges that the growth of wireless technology poses to the security and reliability of our communication infrastructure. Example topics, such as multicast security in 3G networks, security issues in ad hoc networks, and biologically-inspired self-healing security frameworks will be introduced.


Calum Turvey, Dept of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics, and Food Policy Institute

Title: Economics and Agroterrorism

This purpose of this paper is to provide academics, policy makers, and other interested parties with specific insights into how terrorist activities can create economic challenges to the food system in the United States and ultimately its trading partners. To some extent the paper takes its guidance from the recent report from the national Academy of Sciences on Bioterrorism. In particular, that report called for economic analyses into the effects of direct terrorist attacks on the food system as well as the effects of risk perception on consumer behaviour. In general, the presentation will illustrate how economics and economic models can be used in a meaningful way to address the issue of an agroterrorist attack on the food system.


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Document last modified on September 21, 2003.