On-campus Viz Center is making big impact

Flat panoramic screens with video and computer images of the campus and areas of San Diego line the walls of San Diego State's Visualization Center. The Viz Center, as students and faculty call it, is reminiscent of the Counter Terrorist Unit's set design on "24," but actually this is where Eric Frost, co-director of SDSU's Homeland Security program, spends much of his time. While many were watching the news about the California wildfires this past fall, Frost and his team in the Viz Center were busy assisting the media and emergency operation workers with images of the fire. The Viz Center worked with the NASA MODIS team from the Goddard Space Flight Center which received and processed imagery that showed the fires, the smoke and the changes that occurred each day. "We hosted folks from Google and Google Earth and also helped link them to groups like KPBS, whose maps were really of major assistance to lots of folks during the fire," Frost said. Because of his leadership during the 2007 wildfires, Frost recently won the National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue Eagle Award for Leadership. This award is given to individuals and organizations that are the best in preparing and participating in emergency preparedness along with those who are leaders in real-life emergency response procedures. This is not the first time Frost and the Viz Center have been recognized. They have been awarded numerous times for humanitarian assistance disaster relief during the Southeast Asia tsunami in the Banda Aceh area, the Indonesian Java island earthquake and its Merapi volcano, the Hurricane Katrina response and efforts in places such as Afghanistan. "We respond to the disasters to help those in need, using major image processing, geospatial tools and communication capabilities to provide data to disaster areas via challenged bandwidths," Frost said. Frost and the Viz Center have also been recognized for their efforts in San Diego. They have helped the San Diego Police Department with public safety at events such as the 2003 Super Bowl. Many of the projects Frost and the Viz Center are currently working on are focused on humanitarian assistance regionally and internationally. One project is an effort to assist with interaction between civilian groups and the military during disasters. This project is called Golden Phoenix Disaster Experiment and will involve more than 100 agencies and 2,000 people at Brown Field near the U.S.-Mexico border in July to assist with civilian and military interaction in the event of avian influenza, according to Frost. Another project in the works is InRelief.org, a Google domain focused on rapidly bringing global disaster relief. This project's purpose is to help build partnerships between groups such as the U.S. military, global NGOs and response groups such as the World Food Programme. Features on the Web site include data to recent earthquakes, top news stories and satellite tracking. Not only is Frost a co-director of the Homeland Security program and working on many public service projects, he is also co-director of the Viz Center, co-director of the Center for Homeland Security Technology Assessment and co-director of the Center for Information and Technology Infrastructure at SDSU. Besides all of these titles, Frost is also a professor in the College of Geological Sciences and has been teaching at SDSU since 1980. "He is extremely bright, very creative and has the ability to empathize with students and their desires and needs," homeland security graduate student Jim Alexy said. "And he is selflessly available."

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