Crisis has become more frequent and more severe in our society. Whether it is an earthquake or extreme weather causing raging wildfires and massive hurricanes, it’s becoming clear we need to focus on resilience and readiness. Many communities must prepare for this reality while contending with aging and vulnerable infrastructure, making emergency response more difficult. Our lab was born out of necessity, and we devote ourselves to finding new ways to use technology to help with emergency, crisis, and disaster response.
RedLab brings together academia, researchers, entrepreneurs, engineers, data scientists, and innovators together to get innovative solutions rapidly adopted for the greater good. Finding the best technical tools and patterns to follow can make everyone’s life easier and allow for creative solutions to our most pressing problems.
In this way, we are acting as a national, state and local catalyst to enable accelerated actions and progress towards long-term impact. Our strategy is to quickly and iteratively learn, test, and validate solutions with local communities, then work with broader community stakeholders to bring solutions to a global scale.
We do this through:
The IU RedLab formerly Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab (CTIL) is a collaboration between the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (Luddy) and University Information Technology Services (UITS), housed in the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) at IU to accelerate research and practice on the use of next generation technologies in the front lines of emergency and crisis response.
Funded by DOD to support National Emergency TeleCritical Care Network. Integrated improvement system bringing together data science, performance science, and social science.
Explore the TiDE Learning AcceleratorFunded collaboration with U.S. EDA and Indiana Business Research Institute. Improves decision-making, finding relationships between disaster risk, resilience, and cost at the local level.
Learn more about APREDIntegrated data, AI and social science approach to understanding, measuring, and mitigating inequities in emergency preparation, mitigation, response, and recovery.
Funded by NIST, a major national competition with $5.6M prizes to solve one of the biggest technical challenges in emergency response (accurate 3D location tracking in buildings), with the aim of bringing an affordable solution to market within 2–3 years. Partnership with Muscatatuck Urban Training Center. Scalable, repeatable model.
Learn about the FRST ChallengeEnabling local communities, government, individuals and emergency management to use technology in a way that is digitally resilient—that is robust, redundant, secure, and private.
Explore MyDigitalResilienceRapid process that engages teams of students to develop solutions to real-world problems using data science and human computer interaction design.
Undergraduate / graduate classes in application of technology, data science, and human computer interaction to disaster and emergency response.
VFCA helps those in need (organizations and individuals) gain rapid access to appropriate services and support during disaster response and recovery. Data collected via VFCA then supports preparedness and mitigation.
Improves the mechanics of the WebEOC process and breaks down silos, ensures connectivity and information sharing between all levels (local, regional, state, national), sets the stage for a wider integration across the four phases of disaster management.
CTIL CRSS adds scientific support to what are typically manual, one-off calculations. Used to assess vulnerability, capacity, and impact for any area (e.g., city, county) and across all areas.
First Responder Smart Tracking Challenge awards $1.1M to teams developing tracking technology
From News at IU: Participants in a competition run by Indiana University’s Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab are getting closer to bringing a lifesaving solution to market that will provide precise tracking of first responders while they’re inside buildings.
Columbus firefighters test new location technology
From The Republic: Four Columbus Fire Department firefighters participated in the live testing phase of the FRST Challenge.
FRST Competition Phase Three prize winners announced
We’re excited to share the official public announcement for the FRST Challenge Phase Three Prize Winners!
