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New security technologies presented at UCLA symposium

By Harold Lee

Nov. 9, 2003 9:00 p.m.

As homeland security becomes increasingly important, UCLA
researchers are developing technologies to protect civil
infrastructures such as highways and water supplies.

Researchers presented their technologies during a homeland
security symposium hosted Friday by the Henry Samueli School of
Engineering and Applied Science.

There is a notion that technology develops independently from
public policy issues, but in the case of homeland security,
technology is working for public policy, said William Kaiser,
director of the UCLA Homeland Security Technology Program.

“Here is a case where public policy issues are at the root
core,” Kaiser said. “So technology developments have to
consider that and have to be optimized appropriately.”

Networks of sensors are tools that can be the eyes and ears of
homeland security.

By combining small sensing devices, onboard computing and
wireless communication, sensors can observe events previously
unseen by people, said Deborah Estrin, director of the Center for
Embedded Network Sensing.

“If you can get up close to the phenomenon and sense it,
then you could discriminate between events of interest and events
of less interest,” Estrin said.

In addition to stationary sensors, researchers are also
investigating sensors that move by way of unmanned vehicles.

When comparing an environment with a wide distribution of
immobile sensors and one with sensors that can move, the
environment with mobile sensors is more efficient in terms of cost
and energy consumption, said John Villasenor, a professor of
electrical engineering at UCLA who presented at the symposium.

Detecting hazardous chemical and biological agents quickly and
accurately is another challenge in protecting civil
infrastructures, as many can cause damage at low
concentrations.

Nerve gases are toxic at a parts-per-billion level, and some
infectious pathogens cause disease if you inhale one to 10
organisms, said Harold Monbouquette, a UCLA professor of chemical
engineering.

Currently, Monbouquette’s laboratory is developing a
technology capable of detecting a class of compounds that may
target a particular receptor or enzyme in the body, and not
specific substances.

“If terrorists or one of our enemies could come up with
another chemical compound that we haven’t seen before, but if
it addresses a site in our body we know something about, we can
still detect it and show there is a dangerous chemical in the
environment,” Monbouquette said.

New technologies are also needed to test how susceptible
structures are to various attacks.

To protect structures like bridges and reservoirs, it will be
necessary to use computer models to simulate the effects of
disasters on structures as a whole, said Jiann-Wen Ju, a UCLA
professor of civil and environmental engineering and symposium
presenter.

“If you just test one beam, one column or one structural
member … that is not sufficient,” Ju said.

Professor Ju’s research does not only entail designing new
structures that can withstand attacks.

“For existing buildings we can perform certain physical
retrofittings,” Ju said.

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Harold Lee
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