Situational awareness
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www.criticalcomms.com January 2019
a combination of natural language processing and AI to run
those queries with a voicecommand. is has signicant
implications for increasing productivity, as you no longer
have to rely on a human dispatcher carrying out those
queries on your behalf and relaying information over the
radio system. Using voice commands also increases safety,
as the ocer does not have to look down and enter the
information or query,” points out Williams.
Control room trends
One of the biggest trends in control rooms is that companies
are now oering a much more integrated approach,
according to Alex Richardson, senior research analyst in the
Critical Communications Division at IHS Markit.
“ey are not marketing CAD and risk management
software specically. Instead they are approaching it from
a higher level,” he says. “For example, Motorola Solutions
now markets its CommandCentral Aware solution,
which is an integration software solution with access to
incident details, CAD, records intelligence, geospatial data,
real-time alerts from multiple sources and with analytics
capabilitiesbuilt in.
“e CAD system pulls it all together and tells you
what is happening. is improves situational awareness
at the control centre and helps provide a bigger picture of
what is going on. What they are trying to do is get all the
information in front of the operator on one screen.”
He observes that in the past control rooms were entirely
reactive and dominated by voice. “But now you can be
proactive and it is all about preventative policing by having
the ocers positioned in potential trouble spots or nearby.”
Mark Pearson, key account manager for London
Metropolitan Police at control room solutions provider
Frequentis, notes that the use of smartphones and social
media is one way law enforcement can do ‘more with less’.
“ese tools can provide frontline ocers with real-time
access to vast amounts of data, ensuring better intelligence
and situationalawareness.
“e Frequentis LifeX3020 is an example of a solution
that can handle multimedia information that comes in,
in any form, and feed it out to the operator as a single
communication stack. By adding smart geolocation there is
an additional and valuable information layer, for improved
contact handling and resourceallocation.”
Pearson adds that articial/augmented intelligence can
help to consolidate this information and make an ‘intelligent’
presentation of the overall situation to control room
personnel, to aid more ecient decision-making. “Once live
images or videos from the public can be analysed in real time,
the potential is endless,” he says.
Airbus’s Zaknoun argues that one of AI’s main
contributions will be improving workows. “e AI analyses
the intelligence, pulls in lots of historical data and reviews
what resources are available. It then makes suggestions to
the commander about how to allocate the available people
resources to the tasks. It helps the commander decide where
to send his police ocers and which ones should do what.”
Harnessing social media to aid situational awareness can
provoke mixed reactions. Richardson reports being told on
visiting a large control centre in Houston, Texas that they
were not interested in using social media as an intelligencegathering
tool. “But the Metropolitan Police in London love
using it to help predict where a large gathering may happen.”
Airbus oers its Fortion MediaMining solution, an AI tool
that enables security and police ocers to crawl the internet,
social media and the darknet to gure out and predict
what could happen the next day. It has speech-to-text and
translation functions, which helps police prepare better for
potential events.
Rehbehn agrees that there is a benet to be had from
monitoring the sentiment of society as expressed in social
media, but adds: “e challenge of absorbing this volume
of information and making rational operational decisions
is large. ere are eorts to take advantage of AI machine
learning to point to the more important streams that
areappearing.”
One company that oers this kind of intelligence gathering
and analysis is the rather secretive Palo Alto-based Palantir
Technologies, which claims it ‘integrates structured and
unstructured data, provides search and discovery capabilities,
knowledge management, and secure collaboration’. It is
apparently used by US government counter-terrorism analysts
and some police departments.
Crowdsourced applications can also help provide a faster
response to an incident. e FirstNet-approved PulsePoint
app enables CPR-trained bystanders to go to the assistance
of a nearby victim if they are in a public place. e app
also directs potential rescuers to the exact location of the
closestdebrillator. As nearly 1,000 people a day in the
USA die of sudden cardiac arrest and there is little chance of
successful resuscitation after 10 minutes, this kind of app can
really save lives and help out hard-pressed paramedic crews.
Challenges
“New technology and data analytics can play a big role in
enhancing situational awareness, predictive policing and
helping improve the eciency of the emergency services.
We are now moving from where we are today to this more
advanced way of working,” says Airbus’s Zaknoun.
But while there is good reason to be optimistic, Sepura’s
Hudson adds a word of caution: “ere may be lots of new
things coming in the future, but the biggest challenge is to get
the public safety end-users to mobilise and use the apps and
solutions that are already available and start taking the gains
as early as possible.”
Williams points to another challenge. “While this
technology is available, police forces are very procedural in
the way they work. You cannot just throw technology at
them and expect a transformation. ere needs to be cultural
change and adoption of new ways of working. It is not
just a technology issue. It is a human resources and change
management challenge as well.”
Control room
systems can
leverage video
analytics and
social media
feeds to increase
overall situational
awareness, while
AI can be used
to aid decisionmaking
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