Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


NIST Awards $38.5 Million to Accelerate Public Safety Communications Technologies

June 20th, 2017 / in Announcements, pipeline, policy, research horizons, Research News / by Helen Wright

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) logoThe U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded $38.5 million to 33 research and development (R&D) projects aimed at advancing broadband communications technologies for first responders.

The multiyear grants are intended to help modernize public safety communications and operations by supporting the migration of data, video and voice communications from mobile radio to a nationwide public safety broadband network, as well as accelerating critical technologies related to indoor location tracking and public safety analytics.

NIST reviewed 162 proposals from a diverse pool of national and international applicants across industry, academia and public safety organizations. The 33 selected projects span five key technology areas that have the potential to greatly enhance public safety communications and operations:

  • Mission Critical Voice (moving from traditional radios to cellular systems)
  • Location-Based Services (conducting indoor positioning, navigation and mapping)
  • Public Safety Analytics (handling and exploiting more data)
  • Research and Prototyping Platforms (enabling low-cost R&D tools)
  • Resilient Systems (ensuring systems work in poor conditions)

Some of the awardees and their projects are:

Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) – $1,800,000
Real-Time Video Analytics for Situation Awareness

University of Houston (Houston, Texas) – $1,577,626
Multi-tiered Video Analytics for Abnormality Detection and Alerting to Improve Response Time for First Responder Communications and Operations

University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan) – $688,938
Body-Worn Camera Analytics (BOCA) in Public Safety

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, Virginia) – $1,119,854
Towards Cognitive Assistant Systems for Emergency Response

Western Fire Chiefs Association, Inc. (Wilsonville, Oregon) – $1,741,548
Creation of a Unified Analysis Framework and the Data Comparison Center

Additional details may be found on the Public Safety Communications Research website.

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has been focusing in this area of public safety and communications for many years. In 2015, we published white paper on the Video Analysis for Body-worn Cameras in Law EnforcementMore recently, we published an Artifical Intelligence for Social Good workshop report after we co-sponsored a public workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good on June 7th, 2016 in Washington, DC. The workshop discussed the successful deployments and uses of AI in urban computing, health, environmental sustainability, and public welfare.

See all of our white papers and workshops on the CCC website.

NIST Awards $38.5 Million to Accelerate Public Safety Communications Technologies

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