Feature Story

Homeland Security Engineering

Projects under way by engineers affiliated with the University of California at San Diego include:

• Structural engineers are investigating effective ways to retrofit U.S. embassies around the world and other critical structures against blast load. One approach is composite overlays made up of carbon threads precisely woven to increase the strength and flexibility of buildings. These overlays allow the buildings to absorb horizontal forces and keep key structural components from failing.
• Electrical and computer engineers are working on developing a video camera network system that would allow first responders and other emergency personnel to customize their views of a remote incident scene in real-time from a handheld computer. These devices could be installed at airports and other critical sites for counter-terrorism and threat prevention, allowing multiple federal, state, and local authorities to monitor vulnerable sites simultaneously.
• Mechanical and aerospace engineers are working on developing mobile robots, such as those used for search and rescue at the World Trade Center. These robots, however, will use a new approach to legged locomotion to navigate uneven terrain. Today's models are wheeled and tracked and have difficulties navigating uneven terrain. Electrical and computer engineers are working on real-time face detection to isolate and recognize faces in a crowd instantly and accurately without human intervention or supervision. These new systems will be able to work even when lighting conditions aren't optimal and be able to scan larger areas covered by video surveillance systems. These adaptive feature detection algorithms will allow the system to keep track of environmental changes, such as sunlight, and equalize the extracted features. This would allow officials to scan people in line at the INS or Customs as well as monitoring public spaces such as airports and embassies.
• Structural engineers are also working on developing a versatile, efficient, and practical health monitoring strategy for structures. These networks of sensors would report in real time the structural integrity of key structures such as bridges.

Other gems of security under development include:

• Expandable large-span composite assault bridges that can be easily transported via truck;
• Computer chips with built in tiny explosives that would self destruct if they fell into the wrong hands;
• Lasers for anti-missile defense using beam plasma discharge technology;
• Self-healing material polymers for use in bridges and aircraft and such. When cracks appear in the material, the capsules break open, allowing the monomer to come into contact with a catalyst that turns the monomer into a polymer, filling and repairing its own cracks;
• And many, many more.

A researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is taking a novel approach. Professor Vicki Bier, in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering there, has been doing ongoing research on terrorism under funding from CREATE, the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (based at the University of Southern California), which is the first university center of excellence funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (http://www.usc.edu/dept/create/). In particular, she has been using the tools and techniques of industrial engineering to help DHS determine how to best allocate its resources to provide the best, most-cost effective security. This involves lots of mathematical modeling. Some of the specific topics she and her students have tackled include how to keep aircraft safe from surface-to-air missiles, and the vulnerability of our electrical systems, to name just two.

More generally, however, Prof. Bier is using game theory to help DHS protect against intelligent adversaries, which can adapt their tactics to our efforts and strategies. (See the profile on Jun Zhuang, Extreme Engineer, for more on this topic.) What they are learning is that traditional safety thinking may be no longer be effective under these circumstances. For example, if an airport has 10 safety risks, Prof. Bier notes that we will usually do the eight items that will provide 80 percent of the benefit at 20 percent of the cost. However, if the other side can figure out that there are still two areas of vulnerability, the eight items that were fixed might not provide any security at all. To take another example, consider the anthrax scare from 2001. If all post offices in the country had spent the money to buy anthrax sterilization equipment, terrorists could adapt to that just by spending $10 for Federal Express, versus 40 cents for a postage stamp.

Because the U.S. has so many targets, it’s hard to defend them all. As a result, Prof. Bier is starting to look at overarching protections that protect multiple targets. These include border security, intelligence, emergency response (where you don’t have to guess right about targets in order for your investments to pay off), and public health. The intent is to use game theory to help make decisions not only on which targets to defend, but also how much to spend on these kinds of overarching protections, taking into account what terrorists might attempt to do.

Because increased national security has become a high priority in this country, substantial funding is being devoted to advances in this area. As a result, there may be many exciting engineering opportunities well into the future in this field.

"Making the world a safer place is a priority to every engineer," said Linda P.B. Katehi of Purdue University. Purdue focuses its celebration of Engineer's Week as an opportunity to talk about "what's important to citizens and professionals alike and to highlight the role engineering plays in making us all more secure."