Interview
When AI and 5G
come together
Motorola Solutions’ CTO Dr Mahesh Saptharishi and Paul Steinberg, its senior
vice-president of technology, speak to Critical Communications Today about how
AI and 5G can benefit the mission-critical communications community
CCT: Dr Saptharishi, how long have you been
involved in AI?
Dr Mahesh Saptharishi (MS): My background is in
artificial intelligence and computer vision. I started working on
autonomous vehicles and neural networks in the late 1990s,
at a time when neither of them were really in vogue. I was
getting strange stares from people when I told them that I was
attending machine-learning conferences.
CCT: Could you discuss your company’s
approach to AI?
MS: In essence, Motorola Solutions develops technologies
that position our public safety and security customers to be
successful while preventing bad outcomes for them. Our
customers want solutions that give them an early warning that
an event might be happening and the ability to co-ordinate an
effective response. They also want to accurately analyse their
operations, investigate and gather the right evidence after an
event and learn from what happened.
We have a very simple and tangible objective: ensuring that
people receive the right information at the right time so they
can make the right decisions.
Motorola Solutions has been building a complete software
suite for command and control centres and investing in
technologies including AI because we know that much of our
customers’ critical decision-making is centred within control
rooms. Software that leverage AI becomes a powerful tool in
control room environments and for workers out in the field.
It can make people’s lives easier – especially by alleviating the
burden placed on them in busy and stressful times.
Think about well-trained soldiers, first-responders or even
athletes – when they are under high physical and mental stress
their instincts kick in and they rely on the “muscle memory”
they have built up through many hours of practice. We are
extending that notion of muscle memory into software, so
it anticipates the information necessary for individuals to
make effective decisions, enabling them to receive the right
information, presented in an easily digestible way. That
information is personalised, with the software adapting to his
or her needs and the circumstances they face.
Consider how this works in a routine task like looking for
a dangerous suspect. Command centre software gauges the
typical thing that an operator does, which can include looking
at feeds from different sources to find someone matching a
description. After finding the suspect, the operator may analyse
footage from multiple cameras to get the most complete
picture of the suspect’s movements. Command centre software
simplifies and speeds up the search process for the operator
as soon as he or she clicks on an image matching the suspect’s
description. It can automatically compile the relevant footage
and quickly present important information including the
suspect’s movements and where they may be headed to next.
CCT: What are your current goals in terms of
making better use of AI?
MS: Although the topic of AI captures many news headlines,
what matters most to our customers is how it can support
the best possible outcomes. AI should be used to support
the decisions of public safety personnel, giving them the
confidence to make the right moves without compromising
safety or efficiency. We want to shorten the length of time it
currently takes for people to resolve an incident and enable
our customers to make measurable improvements in terms of
decision accuracy and time saving.
CCT: How could AI help control room operators?
MS: Today, command centre operators have to capture and
transcribe information while working across multiple screens,
forms, protocols and workflows. One of the first things we will
deliver is greater consolidation of all of that information across
user interfaces while reducing the complexity of the overall
workflow. Information will also be presented intelligently to
the user in a way that takes important context into account.
AI will also provide the benefit of collective experience and
intelligence, bringing together the knowledge of experienced
command centre operators with real-time information such
as weather reports, social media feeds and other information
sources. Capturing and sharing the knowledge of experienced
operators is very important, especially in command centre
environments where there can be a high amount of turnover
given the highly stressful nature of the job.
Software can reduce this gap between experienced and
newer control room workers by analysing how experienced
operators manage their tasks and then presenting these
September 2019 @CritCommsToday 21