Public safety, public safety technologies, and research within public safety are a continually growing domain. CERT will serve as a vehicle to pursue funding within public safety from agencies such as NSF (e.g., an ERC), DARPA, and others.
CERT will be a high-visibility center for ICS and UCI. Already, the ICS Center has industry support in the form of seed money from the SB Corporation. Current industrial partners (leveraged from Rescue) include market leaders such as Boeing, IBM, and Motorola. A high-visibility center is attractive to other industrial partners and is beneficial to UCI.
Another motivation for establishing CERT is the continuity of the Rescue project. Rescue is in the fourth year of a five year NSF funding cycle. Rescue has established many research areas within the emergency response domain as well as cultivated many industry, academic, and government strategic partners. The CERT ICS center will leverage the established Rescue project and expand upon proven successes.
The proposed center would be a multi-disciplinary is endeavor as evidenced by the eclectic list of faculty participants. These prospective faculty members include UCI sociologists, engineers, and a number of ICS faculty members.