Communications of the ACM
Nist Awards Target Broadband Communications For First Responders
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The U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded $38.5 million to 33 research and development projects aimed at advancing broadband communications technologies for first responders.
"Through programs like FirstNet, President Trump and this administration are working hard to keep Americans safe," said Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. "These grant awards will help fulfill our mission, ensuring that first responders have access to advanced tools that can save lives."
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.
The grants are part of the Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program funded by NIST's $300 million allocation from the 2015 auction of advanced wireless service licenses. The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 provided the funding so that NIST could conduct an R&D program to help public safety overcome critical technical barriers, spur innovation as well as investment in public safety broadband, and realize the full potential of wireless broadband capabilities.
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).
Additional details may be found on the Public Safety Communications Research website.
The awardees, their projects, and the award amounts (rounded to the nearest dollar) are:
Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) – $782,280
An Infrastructure-Free Localization System for Firefighters
Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) – $642,039
Hyper-Reality Helmet for Mapping and Visualizing Public Safety Data
Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) – $1,800,000
Real-Time Video Analytics for Situation Awareness
Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) – $1,241,825
Towards an Emergency Edge Supercloud
George Washington University (Washington, D.C.) – $700,000
Coverage, Capacity, and Resilience Enhancement in Limited PSN
Harris Corp. (Melbourne, Florida) – $200,464
ProSe
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts) – $799,000
Situational Awareness for Emergencies Through Network-Enabled Technologies (SafeT-Net)
Michigan Technological University (Houghton, Michigan) – $1,007,049
Resilient System Solutions for Data Sharing for Wildland Fire Incident Operations
Misram LLC/Spectronn (Holmdel, New Jersey) – $649,984
Heterogeneous Fog Communications and Computing for Resilience
New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (Trenton, New Jersey) – $1,701,657
Fiscal Year 2017 Public Safety Innovation Acceleration Program
New York University (New York, New York) – $2,265,051
End-to-End Research Platform for Public Safety Millimeter Wave Communications
Prominent Edge LLC (Nokesville, Virginia) – $500,218
StatEngine: A Real-Time Open Source Data Analytics and Visualization Platform for Public Safety
Software Radio Systems Ltd. (Cork, Ireland) – $1,453,100
OpenFirst
Sonim Technologies Inc. (San Mateo, California) – $1,398,950
End-to-End Mission Critical Push to Talk with Direct Mode Operation
Southern Methodist University (Dallas, Texas) – $1,343,952
SAFE-NET: An Integrated Connected Vehicle and Computing Platform for Public Safety Applications
Texas A&M Engineering Experiments Station (College Station, Texas) – $1,800,000
DistressNet-NG: Resilient Mobile Broadband Communication and Edge Computing for FirstNet
TRX Systems Inc. (Greenbelt, Maryland) – $1,414,605
TRX First Responder Location and Mapping Services
Universidad del Pais Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (Leioa, Spain) – $1,259,143
Mission Critical Open Platform (MCOP)
University of California, Irvine (Irvine, California) – $1,960,613
Ultimate Navigation Chip (uNavChip): Chip-Scale Personal Navigation System Integrating Deterministic Localization and Probabilistic Signals of Opportunity
University of California, Riverside (Riverside, California) – $1,223,527
Modeling and Development of Resilient Communication for First Responders in Disaster Management
University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Ohio) – $398,869
First Responder Indoor Location Using LTE Direct Mode Operations
University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Ohio) – $500,364
Information-Driven Video Communication for Public Safety Networks
University of Colorado (Boulder, Colorado) – $1,502,796
SDR LTE Network Testbed and RESPONS
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 Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan) – $997,873
Decimeter Accurate, Long Range Non-Line-of-Sight RF Localization Solution for Public Safety Applications
University of Oxford (Oxford, United Kingdom) – $1,182,904
Pervasive, Accurate, and Reliable Location-Based Services for Emergency Responders
University of Southern California (Los Angeles, California) – $449,101
Propagation Channel Models and System Performance for Device-to-Device Communications for Public Safety Applications
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, Virginia) – $1,119,854
Towards Cognitive Assistant Systems for Emergency Response
University of Washington (Seattle, Washington) – $1,000,000
Modeling, Simulation, and Performance Evaluation for Future Public Safety Networks
Vencore Labs Inc./Applied Communications Science (Basking Ridge, New Jersey) – $1,962,779
Device-to-Device System for Public Safety (DDPS)
Voxel51 LLC (Ann Arbor, Michigan) – $1,241,189
ETA: Extensible Tools for Analytics in Public Safety
Western Fire Chiefs Association Inc. (Wilsonville, Oregon) – $1,741,548
Creation of a Unified Analysis Framework and the Data Comparison Center
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