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To address the challenges associated with the adoption of social media, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) established the Virtual Socia Media Working Group (VSMWG) in 2010. The mission of the VSMWG is to provide recommendations to the emergency preparedness and response community on the safe and sustainable use of social media technologies before, during, and after emergencies. Social media includes social networking sites, photo and video-sharing, blogging and microblogging, location-based check-in tools, and more. Drawn from a cross-section of subject matter experts from local, tribal, state, territorial, and federal practitioners, VSMWG members are establishing and collecting best practices and solutions that can be leveraged by public safety officials and responders throughout the nation’s emergency response community. VSMWG membership includes: non-profit organizations; local fire and police; local and county emergency management and public health; academia, and several federal agencies. The VSMWG hosts a monthly virtual meeting to discuss best practices, hear presentations from leaders in the social media field, and to collaborate on documents, routinely inviting other interested parties to join in the discussions.

During an incident, the Next Generation Incident Command System may disseminate real-time information feeds through the Virtual Library, such as vehicle locations, airborne images, video, weather, critical infrastructure, and terrain, in selectable layers that users can access to better handle a crisis or other critical situation. These feeds are then integrated onto an online map using a geographic information system (GIS). Any authorized responder can mark up the map or type a message. The feeds are then available on most geographic information systems that support open GIS standards (for example, ESRI’s ArcGIS). The data in the Virtual Library can be shared between authorized users to provide the most up-to-date information to meet the needs of each incident. This data can then be accessed within the NICS collaboration environment to help support decisionmaking. The NICS collaboration environment along with the Virtual Library will complement California’s existing capabilities for responding to natural or manmade disasters and events.

The Office for Interoperability and Compatibility in partnership with the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) program and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) are conducting modeling and analysis research on deployment of this network. This project uses commercially available off-the-shelf network planning and simulation tools and develops additional models and measurement tools as needed. As public safety begins to deploy their communication systems on a broadband network, they need to be able to truly understand emerging network technologies to maximize the use of this investment. This project’s nationwide modeling approach provides public safety with the ability to evaluate network deployment scenarios and investigate how well new technologies support public safety requirements through analysis of smaller representative sample areas and extrapolation of that data to larger areas. These tools can also be used to optimize network configurations (e.g., sector antenna directions, transmission powers) for various optimization criteria (e.g., maximum coverage area). Network analyses can be used to predict performance metrics over a defined geographic area. Examples of critical metrics include coverage and data rate (i.e., the amount of data or information being sent per a specific unit of time, such as a second).

First responders are often unable to effectively com-municate across jurisdictions during joint operations or major crises because their communications systems do not work with one another. For example, proprietary differences make it difficult for equipment by different manufacturers to communicate. The challenge is finding ways to allow equipment built by dif-ferent manufacturers to communicate effectively. The Project 25 suite of standards is intended to accomplish just that by producing a single set of compatible standards that all land mobile radio manufacturers can use to ensure equipment can communicate reliably, regardless of manufacturer. Such standards mean a higher degree of integration among different systems and greater interoperability which, in turn, can save limited agency funds by making it unnecessary to re-place otherwise serviceable equipment to achieve in-teroperability. Many of these still-serviceable older base station systems can be useful for another 10 to 20 years.

The goal of this Field Latent Print Project is to evaluate the viability and practicality of applying military technology to local law enforcement and to determine if digitally capturing latent finger-prints in the field could result in improved police services, reduce the time to establish leads and solve more cases with a positive outcome. The results of this research have been significant in de-monstrating that the ability to capture a latent print and within minutes show a gallery of potential matches to the victim while still at an active crime scene increases the capacity and efficiency of all law enforcement personnel. Stockton has now formed a partnership with Clarkson University, which was recent-ly awarded a CITeR (Center for Identifica-tion Technology Re-search) research grant, to conduct independent research of this tech-nology application. For the CITeR award, Clarkson will collect additional data to analyze how to utilize latent prints. Their innovative plan will focus on why certain latent prints resulted in no-hits while others were hits.