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Information Technology Laboratory / Information Access Division

Multimodal Information Group

Analytics Container Environment (ACE) Reference Framework

What is ACE?

The Analytics Container Environment (ACE) is a tool developed in support of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Division, which provides a modular framework for running containerized analytics on streaming video.

The purpose of the NIST ACE project is to enable easier prototyping of cutting edge analytics to the public safety community. ACE aims to overcome some of the current challenges in prototyping analytics to the public safety community, which include technical challenges such as the lack of standard interfaces between analytics, the experimental nature of analytics (not designed to function as a part of a pipeline or distributed system), and the “black box” nature of analytics. Public safety organizations face other logistical, policy, and resource challenges as well, but our hope is that by addressing the technical challenges and reducing the cost and complexity of deploying analytics over the course of the NIST ACE project, interested organizations will be able to experiment with and utilize analytics in their environments.

USES

Thus far our goal has been to create an open source, modular, analytic microservice framework and toolkit that would serve several purposes:

To provide analytic researchers and developers with tools and libraries to easily turn their analytics into ACE microservices, allowing them to more easily incorporate their analytics into the ACE toolkit, as well as providing them with a means of easily testing their analytics.
To provide public safety end users with a simple framework that would allow them to easily deploy and use analytics without requiring subject matter expertise and significant coding. The goal is for adopters to be able to pick and choose the analytics that they want to run, deploy them, and have them begin working with minimal configuration.
To provide open source tools which allow for easy test and experimentation using the framework. This includes collecting stream and analytic data throughout the pipeline and providing tools such as proxies and filters that allow users to modify a stream.