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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's (PNNL) Precision Information Environments (PIE) program, funded by the Visualization and Analytics Program within DHS Science and Technology Directorate, is working with several new research and end-user partners. DHS Customs and Border Protection's National Targeting Center is exploring PIE-related information interfaces as part of next-generation targeting systems and has invited the PIE team to take part in co-development activities. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability has engaged PIE in helping envision the future of situational awareness and decision support capabilities for energy infrastructure.

PIE researchers are building advanced prototypes that demonstrate heuristic evaluations, usability tests, iterative rapid prototyping, re-useable UX, architecture, algorithms, simulations and data models. Some of their work is dealing with New User Interface (NUI) Research, which addresses aspects of touch, proximity sensing, gesture, voice, and interconnected smart devices within the environment.

In October 2010, PNNL PIE team members took part in the SurfNet annual meeting; SurfNet is an NSERC-funded Canadian research alliance for surface computing environments (http://www.nsercsurfnet.org/). PIE and SurfNet are working to identify potential collaborative R&D activities. The PIE concept was also presented by researchers in the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources at the Wildland Fire Canada 2010 conference.

The PNNL PIE team is also beginning to define co-development activities with commercial partners, including several of the country's largest information technology firms. These co-development activities are designed to accelerate the delivery and support of PIE capabilities to end users.

Based on the initial PIE concept developed in partnership with end-users across the homeland security community, the PNNL PIE team is working on three connected research thrusts: • multimodal interaction environments for collaborative decision making • automated generation and delivery of user-specific information feeds across multiple platforms, and • task tracking and routing.

About PIE
Working with partners from across the emergency management community and through the support of DHS, researchers from PNNL are developing future work environments for emergency management. These PIEs will provide tailored access to information and decision support capabilities that adapt to the varying users and phases of emergency management. A PIE will provide analysis and simulation capabilities through novel interactions that transform planning, communications and decision making by emergency response personnel, policy makers, and the public. For more information about the PIE program, visit: http://precisioninformation.org/.