Memories of 9/11 Spur Port-Security Research Team’s Success

On Sept. 9, 2001, Dr. Chin Chang boarded United Airlines (UA) flight number 175 out of Boston’s Logan Airport bound for his home near Los Angeles. The flight proceeded smoothly and arrived on time.

Two mornings later, the same flight departed Boston, but this time UA175 became a weapon in the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, as hijackers flew the plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

For Chang, the events of Sept. 11 hit so close to home—he was 48 hours from being on one of the planes—that they spurred a dramatic shift in his research focus. “This was the first time for me to pay serious attention to terrorism events,” he said. “I started to think how to prevent them, from a technological prospective. Since then, I have directed my research interest from broadband communication toward homeland security.”

His dedication to terrorism prevention has led Chang and two students to take part in the 2009 U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Summer Research Team Program for Minority Serving Institutions, hosted by the National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California. The program, funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is administered by Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.  The objective of the DHS Summer Research Team Program for Minority Serving Institutions is to increase and enhance the scientific leadership at Minority Serving Institutions in research areas that support the mission and goals of DHS by providing research opportunities to teams composed of a faculty member and up to two students.

Chang, a faculty member at California State University, Long Beach, was joined by undergraduate students from the school’s College of Engineering: Minh Hoang Nguyen and Diran Samarijian. The trio’s assignment focused on port security where they developed a cost-benefit model for an automatic X-ray—cargo-container inspection system at the Ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach aimed at preventing the smuggling of radiological or nuclear material used in building weapons of mass destruction or radiological dispersal devices also known as “dirty bombs.”

In the journey from research to implementation, cost is too often ignored, Chang contends. “The common pitfall in the research and development of technology is that the researcher tends to overlook the cost prior to committing valuable resources. Our goal is to evaluate cost-effectiveness and justify the investment of the X-ray inspection technology.”

The team has partnered with CREATE’s Port Security Group on the PortSec project, which involves developing a system for performing risk-based analysis of security countermeasures to reconcile the seemingly opposing goals of minimizing the risk of terrorism while maintaining unimpeded flow of daily port activity. Chang’s team collaborated closely with other researchers and toured the ports as part of the process.

CREATE’s leadership credits the threesome with bringing fresh ideas and energy to a critical homeland-security priority. “Dr. Chang and his student team have enthusiastically engaged CREATE researchers in a highly integrated and productive project on port security,” said Isaac Maya, the center’s interim director and director of research. “The collaboration is an excellent example of how DHS Centers of Excellence can leverage talented faculty and students at minority-serving institutions with this program for the benefit of all involved.”

Chang, who considers Albert Einstein his hero, has high hopes for the team’s short-term contributions to long-term solutions. His next step: developing a multi-year research project for maritime and seaport security.

“Einstein expanded the range of human knowledge. As a researcher, this is my duty and dream,” Chang said. “Innovation in technology improves the quality of human life. My goal is to explore homeland-security technology for our national security and to keep prosperity for the nation.”