PSCR 2020: Hidden Gems

PSCR 2020 attendees couldn't click away from these presentations! Check out the four on-demand sessions that attendees spent the most time watching. Make sure to fill out a feedback form to let the researchers know what you think!

4. Making an Impact: Experiences of PSCR Awardees

This session explores the impacts of the PSIAP program on award recipients. They discuss their experience including how the program affected their organization, expanded their network, and introduced them to public safety. They also discuss how PSCR can continue to make an impact for first responders.

3. Mapping Indoor Environments to Support Navigation Systems for First Responders

First responder navigation and tracking systems will require accurate maps of indoor environments. To help create a database to support the development and deployment of indoor navigation and tracking systems, we used Paracosm’s PX-80 handheld LiDAR to collect imagery and 3D point cloud data for 11 schools, administrative buildings, and industrial buildings in Enfield and Storrs, Connecticut. We developed a manual procedure for mapping features-of-interest that used Paracosm’s Retrace and ESRI’s ArcGIS software. This project demonstrated that a handheld LiDAR data can be used to efficiently create products to support indoor navigation and tracking systems as well as provide more general support to first responder operations.

2. Social Media Incident Streams

This session describes an effort to collect and annotate social media data for public safety. The Social Media Incident Streams project gathers tweets sent during emergencies, including earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, and mass shootings. The tweets are labeled by human annotators to indicate whether the information is relevant to public safety, what specific category or need it represents, and how time-critical a response is. This activity takes place within NIST’s Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), a 28-year ongoing activity that builds labeled datasets for search, information retrieval, information filtering, recommendation, and other AI tasks.

1. CHARIoT Prize Challenge Discussion

The CHARIoT Challenge is tasking developers to create visual interfaces for public safety using personal area networks, smart buildings, and smart city IoT sensor data. The contestants will leverage these sensors and provide actionable alerts to incident command and first responders through augmented reality headsets. During this session, attendees will learn more about the challenge structure, benefits of IoT sensor data and spatial computing, and see a sneak peak of the final event where judges will be donning the final prototypes and responding to simulated wildfire, active shooter, flood, and mass transits accident scenarios.