Creativity can strike in unexpected places, from the grocery store to the hurricane-ravaged mountains. A trio of Wake Forest faculty have used such light-bulb moments to develop creative solutions to complex problems.
Computer Science Professor Errin Fulp turned to nature years ago to develop “digital ants” that hunt down computer viruses. More recently, the grocery store checkout line gave him an idea for improving internet speed and security. Assistant Professor of Communication Rowena Rowie Kirby-Straker studies the ways storytelling can influence disaster preparedness. And Economics Professor Fred Chen sees a creative application for economics — helping save endangered rhinos. —Kerry M. King (’85)
Rowena Rowie Kirby-Straker
Assistant Professor of Communication
Storytelling can be a powerful tool to help people prepare for and recover from natural disasters, says Assistant Professor Rowena Rowie Kirby-Straker, who studies how communication can influence behavior.
Stories of past experiences can shape risk perception and disaster preparedness. “How people perceive risks should be factored into disaster communication,” she says. “That’s important because technical experts perceive risk very differently from people on the ground. So how can communication from lived experiences improve outcomes and save lives, livelihoods and property, in addition
to messages coming top down?”
In 2021, Kirby-Straker received a timely grant from the Natural Hazards Center, the U.S. National Science Foundation’s designated information clearinghouse for the societal effects of hazards and disasters. She studied how individuals’ past experiences shape how they react to future extreme weather events. Her results showed that experiencing material loss or other personal harm during an extreme weather event can have a strong, direct positive influence on individuals’ preparedness behavior for future disasters.
“Risk communicators can apply these findings by working with communities to help them process stories of loss and use those stories
to save lives and valued possessions,”
she says.
Kirby-Straker regularly teaches a class on environmental risk and crisis communication. In her class this spring, she asked students to explore disaster-preparedness messages from various sources — national and local media reports, weather predictions, official warnings and communication from government officials and nongovernmental organizations — leading up to Hurricane Helene, which killed hundreds and ravaged western North Carolina and other Southern states last fall.
She hopes students will recognize the complexities involved in disaster communication, including the context of messages, who they’re from and how those factors could help or hinder disaster preparedness and response.
Individual risk perception feeds into community-level risk perception, Kirby-Straker says, and collective decision making plays a critical role in preparing for a disaster and rebuilding after a storm. It’s especially important to build trust in under-resourced communities, because those are often the ones that bear more risk and harm from natural disasters or environmental problems, she says.
In areas less susceptible to natural disasters, collective memory of past disasters often fades quickly, she says. Warnings of a dangerous hurricane forming traditionally have been regarded as very relevant in the hurricane-prone Caribbean — where Kirby-Straker grew up — but not so much in the North Carolina mountains.
Storytelling is especially important during the time gap between disasters. “People may say, ‘Oh, that happens only every 20 years.’ How do we keep those stories relevant and remind people when there’s another one?” she says. “That knowledge circulating in the community is really important, especially for rare events. If these stories can be kept alive in the community, especially through intergenerational storytelling, can that prepare people?”
While storytelling is important, we need to be respectful about how stories are shared, she says. “These are sad stories, and we don’t want to get to a point where we become desensitized to them or seem to be taking advantage of people’s pain, even if we think it’s for a good cause.”
Fred Chen
Professor of Economics
Can economics save endangered rhinos from poaching? Professor Fred Chen, who started researching the economics surrounding rhino horns nearly a decade ago, says introducing lab-grown horns into the marketplace could decrease the demand for illegal wild horns.
The poaching of rhino horns is essentially an economics problem, but it’s not based on a simple supply-and-demand model, Chen says, because the poaching and selling of animal parts doesn’t occur in a typical competitive market. “Many of the issues involved in economics of conservation are economics ideas that you won’t encounter in Economics 101,” he says. “You need more advanced economics to understand these things.”
Chen first started researching synthetic horns in 2016 after he read an article about the topic that he thought used the wrong economic analysis. He has since formulated economic models to predict how lab-grown horns would fare in the marketplace.
His initial research, “The Economics of Synthetic Rhino Horns,” showed that synthetic horns can reduce the demand for rhino horns. Synthetic horns engineered to be all but indistinguishable from real horns to most would-be consumers would create confusion in the marketplace, he says. “The main idea is: Can producing high quality fakes, like synthetics, destabilize markets so that they have beneficial conservation results?”
Chen compares it to buying luxury goods on Amazon. If you’re not sure you’re buying the real thing, how much are you willing to pay for it? “If you create enough confusion, and people are more reluctant to buy the product, that would reduce demand” and drive down prices, he says, making poaching less profitable.
“You can’t just say, ‘Oh, it could lead to more demand, so we don’t want it.’ I think we need to dig a little deeper than that.”
Chen says there are many variables to be considered. If synthetic horns
are indistinguishable from real horns, how do you tell which ones are legal — the real horns or the synthetic ones? How do you prevent poachers from “laundering” real horns by passing them off as synthetic horns? How do you ensure there are enough producers of synthetic horns to keep prices competitive versus a monopoly producer? The latter could charge higher prices, which would keep the prices of real horns high, too, and continue to incentivize poaching.
In a forthcoming book, “The Economics of Wildlife Trade: Theory and Implications for Conservation,” Chen delves more into the economic principles involved in wildlife trade and conservation issues. Chen was co-recipient last year of Wake Forest’s URECA Faculty Award for Excellence in Mentorship in Research and Creative Work in the Sciences and Social Sciences.
Conservation groups oppose the idea of synthetic horns, arguing that they would remove the stigma from owning horns, increase demand for authentic horns, worsen the poaching problem and make it more difficult for law enforcement to spot illegal horns. A 2024 story on National Public Radio said conservationists viewed the idea of synthetic horns “as misguided at best and dangerous at worst.”
The same story notes that Chen’s economic models suggest that lab-grown horns could be a powerful tool in conservation, even if they led to some increase in the demand for the real thing. “You can’t just say, ‘Oh, it could lead to more demand, so we don’t want it.’ I think we need to dig a little deeper than that,” Chen told NPR.
Chen knows he’s facing an uphill battle to convince conservationists but says it’s not a reason to shut down further study of the idea. “That could lead us to the outcome we all want — saving animals.”
Errin Fulp
Professor of Computer Science
Professor Errin Fulp was waiting in line at the grocery store when he saw a way to increase internet speed.
Fulp, who was researching how to make digital information pass more quickly through security firewalls, saw that the problem was similar to choosing the fastest-moving grocery store checkout line.
Data that flows along the internet is organized in “packets” that pass through firewalls to protect computer networks from malicious attacks. The firewall inspects and filters arriving and departing packets by using millions of “rules” to make sure the information is safe to pass through to your network and ultimately your computer.
“The firewall causes a lot of pain points,” Fulp says. “When a packet arrives at a firewall, the firewall has to figure out whether or not it should enter my network or leave my network. A growing set of rules slows things down.”
Fulp compares that to a typical grocery store scenario. You try to pick the shortest checkout line, but inevitably you choose the slowest line. The same problem affects information passing through a firewall; once your information is in a “lane,” it could get stuck.
“We thought we could flip it around a little bit,” Fulp says, explaining the grocery store analogy. “Instead of picking one cashier, could I take my basket of goods and split it up across all cashiers? If I’ve got 25 things, I can give each cashier five things. I can get through in the amount of time it takes to check out five (items) versus 25 (items).”
Fulp’s idea was to duplicate packets so they could be processed simultaneously by multiple firewalls, like dividing your grocery order among five cashiers. Each firewall applies a shorter set of rules “leading to a dramatic improvement in speed,” he says.
In 2003, Fulp received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue his research. Fulp and Robert Anderson (MBA ’94) founded startup GreatWall Systems in 2005 with Dave Ahn (’95) joining in its early stage. With an additional grant from the Energy department, they built a team of largely Wake Forest alumni and students to develop Fulp’s idea into a product.
You probably don’t know it, but your computer at home or work likely uses a similar system. “It’s been more successful than I ever imagined,” Fulp says.
GreatWall was later acquired for its innovative and groundbreaking network filtering technologies by Centripetal Networks, where Ahn is chief architect and vice president.
Fulp is a visiting scholar-in-residence at Centripetal, where he leads research in cyber threat intelligence and how threat data can be analyzed, curated and transformed into rules in firewalls for protection. Wake Forest graduate students and undergraduates regularly work with Centripetal.
They are investigating a new set of questions: When a firewall is applying millions of rules, how can you select the ones most appropriate for a particular customer to make the process go even faster? How can you write rules to protect against future threats based on prior attacks?
How can you write rules to protect against future threats based on prior attacks?
“We’re also looking at how things are progressing in terms of an attack,” Fulp says. “We’re really good at Day Zero (when an attack occurs), but we’re trying to get a few days ahead. We would like to understand, based on prior attacks, what are good rules to have in the future based on what we’re seeing.”
On his visits to the grocery store, as he waits in line, Fulp now finds himself asking a new question: “How can I get my items to do a self-checkout?”
