UC Berkeley Professor, Students, Create Web Site to Help Public Know If Loved Ones are Safe Following Today's Terrorist Attacks

Business Wire, Sept 11, 2001

News Editors

BERKELEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 11, 2001

A University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor and two computer science students created a Web site today (Tuesday, Sept. 11) to help the public find out about the safety of loved ones affected by the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

The interactive database can be found at: http://safe.millennium.berkeley.edu.

The Web site allows individuals in the affected areas to post information about their status and for their loved ones to find out if they are safe. The site does not have access to airline flight manifests or lists of known dead.

To search for this information through the Internet, people can enter the party's name, zip code, last four digits of phone number, birth date and other personal information.

"This will help relieve people worried about loved ones, without clogging phone lines that already are overloaded," said Jennifer Mankoff, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley's electrical engineering and computer science department.

The site was created by graduate students Miriam Walker and Ka-Ping Yee working with Mankoff.

The site is hosted on the Millennium Cluster, a high-performance computing facility at UC Berkeley.