A team working under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security-funded Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) is creating a system that will speed and help make more consistent the difficult task of quantifying risk estimates to guide policymakers.
University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute project leader Michael Orosz is leading the team working on the tool, called Risk Analysis Workbench, or RAW, which will ultimately be used at all eight DHS research centers, not just CREATE, which is located at the University of Southern California.
ISI is part of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, which also is co-host of CREATE.
The project brings together longstanding ISI strengths in web resources, information sharing and artificial intelligence to the task of gathering and distributing the specific data necessary to perform the tree analyses and other problems of "what-if" risk analysis in a speedy and -- above all -- in a uniform way.
ISI insights and inventions around the "semantic web," -- systematic structuring of database information to make it more accessible over the Internet -- are a major part of the system, which is also incorporating efforts by ISIs Robert Neches and Tatiana Kichkaylo.
RAW grows directly out of work by CREATE director Detlof von Winterfeldt, a professor in the Viterbi School department of industrial and systems engineering with a distinguished career stretching back decades in the field of risk assessment.
In an interview, Von Winterfeldt illustrated the way that the analysis proceeds by pointing to a specific CREATE study he himself completed, about the dangers posed by a small, man-portable anti- aircraft rockets being used to bring down a passenger airline, tracking consequences out a "decision trees" of alternate possibilities to evaluate costs and benefits.
The estimate for the cost of installing coun
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Contact: Eric Mankin
mankin@usc.edu
310-448-9112
University of Southern California
31-May-2007