Raman Lakshmanan, Ph.D., specialist professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and recent computer science graduate Ava Taylor ’23 successfully filed a non-provisional U.S. patent and trademark application for FLUDZ, a crowd-sourced flood data distribution service. The application was granted in December and is the University’s first patent in nearly two decades.

The service originated from Taylor’s honors thesis research on the lack of flood data at the local level and the need for a cost-effective way to report and track flooding.

With the FLUDZ service, users can report flooded areas, worsening conditions, road hazards, flood depth estimates, and more in real time, while also receiving information on safe evacuation routes.

According to Lakshmanan and Taylor, current emergency alert systems are not as effective as they could be in protecting the public during flood events. This app aims to fill a void at the local level for more than 167 million people in the U.S. exposed to flood risks—a number expected to increase as climate, urbanization, and land use changes progress.

The system and method for local flood data collection and distribution developed for FLUDZ could also be adapted for other applications, including pollution reporting, tree/plant disease tracking, reservoir overflow monitoring, and more.