Building on more than $60 million in basic and applied research and 20 years of work in the field, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is nearing release of a comprehensive database on explosives.
ExPRT, as the database is known, will assist subject matter experts, frontline personnel and explosives researchers access to research and development data, tests and evaluation details reaching back to the early 2000s. Developed by Dr. Anna Tedeschi and subject matter experts from S&T’s Modeling and Simulation Technology Center, the system is meant to improve collaborative efforts, expand overall knowledge and guarantee best practices.
“As we look to the future of this field, we’ve run into a new challenge: finding a way to effectively organize, compile, and share this information to ensure ongoing collaboration, avoid conducting repetitive or unnecessary studies, prevent institutional memory loss, and to strategically plan and budget program investments in future research to close knowledge or technology gaps,” Tedeschi, S&T’s Explosives Threat Assessment (ETA) program manager, said.
Her team’s solution was born of collaboration with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Office for Bombing Prevention (OBP), as ExPRT utilized that office’s Technical Resource for Incident Prevention (TRIPWire) Portal to develop, prototype and host.
“ExPRT is a versatile research platform that can help DHS and the explosives community meet their immediate and long-term needs,” Tedeschi said. “For example, if an intelligence analyst identifies a bomb threat in the field, we want them to be able to contact SMEs who can then immediately query ExPRT and determine whether it is a known or new threat and provide guidance to our responders in the field. The database will also be accessible from mobile devices via a mobile-friendly website or application so that responders can access it themselves if they feel comfortable doing so.”
Current users can use it to view completed and ongoing studies, technical information, reports on screening and mitigation technologies, as well as contact information for organizations that have funded and conducted relevant studies. They can in turn upload their own materials and provide feedback to further refine the database and website on which it appears.
This fits with Tedeschi’s views, which recognize that explosives, as a field, is rapidly evolving.
Earlier this year, ExPRT was released as a minimum viable product for further testing. That testing is currently internal, but once that concludes, colleagues at the Department of Energy labs and the Federal Bureau of Investigation will be invited into the fold to assess the database as well. With their feedback on layout, navigation, functionality and accuracy in hand, a refined version of the ExPRT database could then be rolled out.