Critical infrastructure research
RedLab is a team of experienced researchers, developers and practitioners based at Indiana University and in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Southern Indiana, working to dramatically improve safety, data, communications and situational awareness for emergent situations such as disasters, emergency response and battlefield environments.
With facilities on the IU campus and partnerships with the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center and NIST PSCR, we act as a national, state and local catalyst.
Programs
NIST PSCR
A partnership with NIST PSCR to bring affordable 3D off-grid tracking of first responders to market, locating a firefighter inside a burning building when there is no network to rely on. Final competition held at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center.
$8M · prize competition
US Army Futures Command
Improving in-field disaster medical response using modern communications technologies, so that critical care expertise reaches patients in austere settings. Related work on tele-critical care readiness published in Military Medicine.
$2.2M · field-deployed
US Economic Development Administration
A multi-domain platform enabling integrative planning to reduce the future costs of disasters, computing jointly across risk, resilience and economic data. Published in the Journal of Emergency Management.
$652K · field-deployed
What we work on
We work with foundational methods across AI, data science, graph and semantic methods, and human-computer interaction design, and carry that through to systems tested with practitioners in the field. The failures in this domain are rarely purely technical, so neither is the research.
Much of what responders need is never captured. We create it — technical data such as precise in-building location, and human data such as what commanders need to know and when.
Graph, semantic and topological methods for joining sources that were never designed to interoperate, and surfacing structure that indicates risk concentrating or an event forming.
Machine learning and language-model systems that summarize, prioritize and answer questions against large volumes of incident data, with attention to calibration and to when such systems are trusted.
Technology that works when the infrastructure does not: edge and offline architectures, local models, and redundant and off-grid communications.
Work with us
We are seeking research and development partners in situational awareness, resilient communications, disaster analytics and emergency medicine, including SBIR and STTR teaming. We also work closely with our Hacking for Defense program
RedLab · Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
