Devices confuse Amherst: Experiment brings out bomb squad

BY Mary Carey
Staff Writer

Published on June 15, 2007

University of Massachusetts police closed a segment of North Pleasant Street for an hour and 20 minutes and called the bomb squad Saturday after finding a trio of boxes with antennas on them that turned out to be a computer science experiment.

A caller alerted UMass Police at 3 p.m. that there was a clear box with electronics inside wired to a bicycle at a campus bus stop on North East Street between Governor's Drive and Infirmary Way. Not knowing what it was, police shut down that segment of the street and evacuated pedestrians in the area. A passer-by told police there was another box like it near the campus pond locked to a bicycle like the first one.

Amherst Police became involved in the search and a third box was identified.

UMass Police Lt. Ian Cyr said police called the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority thinking the box might be connected with the boxes in the front of buses enabling passengers to connect to the Internet. But a PVTA representative said the company was not aware of any boxes being located off the buses.

Police also tried to contact Brian Levine, a computer science professor whose card was inside one of the boxes. Unable to reach him, they called the bomb squad, which arrived and determined there was no danger, Cyr said.

'There was no communication to us that these devices were there. Our initial assessment was that nobody had knowledge of this being part of an ongoing study,' Cyr said.

'We did reach out to Mr. Levine and got an apology,' Cyr said. 'We're working with them now.'

Levine has been working on an experiment in which he and his colleagues have wired buses, parts of the UMass campus and downtown Amherst for Internet access. They are trying to find out what would happen if a natural disaster hit and disrupted service.

The title of one Levine's papers recently accepted for publication is 'Study of a Bus-Based Disruption Tolerant Network: Mobility Modeling and Impact on Routing.'

The boxes, which have a sign on them in bold letters saying UMass Computer Science, Levine said, are solar-powered data relay boxes. 'The idea is they are easy to place outside during a disaster,' he said.

Levine and colleague Mark Corner have been putting the boxes on campus on and off for months, weather permitting. They had been on campus for at least a week this time, Levine said.

'We weren't trying to cause any problems. We were hoping to avoid any confusion,' Levine said.

It's not the first time Levine's experiment has caused concern. Last year, when he and Corner explained that they would like to wire all of Amherst and pay for it, in part, with a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Amherst Select Board members said they feared the Defense Department might listen in on residents' conversations.

Levine and Corner later had to scale the project back when they did not receive as much funding from grants as they had anticipated.

Mary Carey can be reached at mcarey@gazettenet.com.