Get inspired by learning how the City of San Francisco collaborates with the private sector and its citizens to create new apps and other innovations to improve public safety and emergency response.

This session will discuss NG9-1-1, identify potential issues and opportunities for PSAPs, and address the integration of NG9-1-1 systems and centers with other emerging technologies and services.

APCO and the Federal Communications Commission have been focused on improving wireless 9-1-1 location accuarcy, including indoors, as well as enabling deployment of text to 9-1-1 services. APCO staff will help explain what APCO members need to know about these recent developments.

Getting the precise location of a 9-1-1 caller has always been a challenge for public safety. With more calls coming from indoor environments, the challenge has only increased. The FCC recently indicated an intent to provide mandates for indoor location accuracy and is asking for initial progress in as little as two years. Is the industry up for this challenge?

This session will explore both current GPS technology and emerging technologies – such as Small cells, Bluetooth, WiFi and metropolitan beacons – which promise to improve indoor location accuracy. Recommendations will be presented for how these solutions can be combined to deliver unprecedented granularity, accuracy and location trustworthiness.

This presentation will focus on how the convergence of open data, applications (especially mobile apps) and social media can improve public safety by galvanizing concerned citizens in support of their 911 centers and responders. The Open Data movement started with the City of Washington DC and has spread to most state and major city/county governments. It emphasizes placing a wide variety of public safety information on an open portal such as data.gov. Examples of such data include 911 calls, 911 incidents, crime reports, restaurant inspections and more. These open data feeds, in turn, drive both government agencies and private developers to write a number of apps which help inform and protect citizens. Examples of these include Stumble Safely (Washington, Baltimore), Seattle Emergency Management (Seattle), Crime Reports dot com, and a number of others some of which are found on APCO’s public safety apps showcase appcomm.org . Finally, leading municipal governments are using map mashups, blogs, twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets to better inform and engage the media and citizens. Some of these innovations include tweets-by-beat and the effective use of social media during the Calgary floods of 2013 and the Boston Marathon Bombing. The presentation will highlight such past successes and point the way to potential future uses of open data and apps in sensor-driven public safety applications such as connected vehicles, smartgrid and NG911/FirstNet.

Discussion of the history of priority access for public safety on commercial networks, the regulatory and business issues which have shaped the current situation and how commercial networks can provide mission-critical support for public safety users.

As the landline phone has been replaced by the mobile phone, the ability to accurately find these emergency callers indoors has been impacted. We will explore how PSAPs can better use the location data that is available today along with new location technologies, NG 9-1-1 data sources and data analytics to more accurately identify a dispatchable location for an emergency caller.

Unintentional denial of service (DoS) from the bandwidth requirements of streaming video between incident commanders and field units is a serious challenge facing current and planned public safety networks. This session will focus on a near-term solution all around us: digital broadcast television (DTV). DTV is specifically designed to perform the function that most stresses LTE: moving multiple high-end video streams to an unlimited number of receive devices—simultaneously. Using existing spectrum and encryption technology, DTV capacity can be deployed as needed in public emergencies to “off-load” demand from public safety networks, much as Wi-Fi does with cellular now. Broadcasters and public safety agencies have enjoyed a partnership that goes back many decades. John Lawson will explain how a hybrid network approach can take that partnership to a whole new level.

In the United States the wireless penetration rate is 104% for 2013 with smartphone usage rising 50% over the year before. According to Cisco, in 2018 there will be more mobile connected devices than people on the planet. Mobile is everywhere, especially during crisis events.

In this session, hear lessons learned from the field and new research insights that share how the future of crisis communications and community engagement is being shaped. Featured in the discussion will include insights from the field where San Francisco Department of Emergency Management and Verizon share insights on community and enterprise preparedness and response activities, including the Napa Earthquake while CTIA and the University of Kentucky will share research on crisis messaging in the new world of IoT data insights such as the Jawbone data from the Napa Earthquake.

Come prepared to learn about exciting new ways in which Mobile and IOT is changing the landscape of crisis communications and response!

Hear about the recent progress and future plans of FirstNet in its efforts to implement a nationwide, interoperable, public-safety broadband network.

Hear from state officials serving as the FirstNet point of contacts on their current perspectives and experiences thus far planning for FirstNet and the state and local consultation process.

Recently, FirstNet sought public input to inform its formulation of a comprehensive network solution, and carry out the intent of its enabling legislation.  FirstNet’s Ed Parkinson will begin by describing what FirstNet hopes to gain with these public inquiries and next steps. Next, APCO’s Jeff Cohen will outline the responses APCO provided.

Lockheed Martin collaborates with the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International, universities, public safety communications professionals, and state and local first responder agencies to develop public safety mobile applications. This multi-stakeholder program, with the State of Maryland and Bowie State University, immerses Education Innovation Initiative (EI2) Fellows with Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), Emergency Operations Center (EOC), and first responder professionals to research, develop and evaluate the mission effectiveness of mobile broadband applications. This session will provide background on the unique program and outline both recent accomplishments and future research and development plans.

The San Francisco Police Department is incorporating mobile platforms and apps, smartphones, tablets, and other devices into the hands of its law enforcement officers. Learn about the impact of these innovations on policing and the interplay with emergency dispatch operations.

Today’s public safety agency needs more than a crystal ball to plan for the ever-changing technology environment surrounding public safety communications. Should the agency invest in LMR or in broadband? What role should commercial cellular play? How can the real requirements of public safety communications – persistence, coverage, reliability – be met in the future? This presentation will discuss the alternative paths to keeping your communications environment “future proof” while serving your needs today. A key focus will be on the three pillars to tomorrow’s communications solution: LMR, commercial cellular and B14 LTE.

The public safety community needs to be as prepared as possible in the event of network outages due to natural or manmade disasters, which inevitably occur. This session will describe the options that satellite communications technologies provide for serving secondary and tertiary connectivity requirements of public safety.

The goal of FirstNet is to make it easy for first responders and other emergency personnel to access and exchange mission-critical information from state and federal agencies, geospatial information, real-time video from crime scenes and sensor data from disaster sites, as well as simply talk to one another across multijurisdictional lines. While there’s no doubt FirstNet will be a boon to public safety, we shouldn’t lose sight of the “security” part of the equation in our haste to guarantee optimal communications. This presentation will address network and device security for FirstNet and what we can do now to make it better and more robust, while driving down the cost of securing the network.

Big Data has become one of the most powerful weapons to Law Enforcement, empowering agencies and personnel with actionable intelligence to not only secure the public, but analyze patterns to mitigate future security and safety threats. We will examine leading trends and the growing use of Big Data in public safety.

APCO has a number of initiatives underway related to cybersecurity. As one example, APCO collaborated with FirstNet and the Department of Commerce to invite public safety professionals, app developers, and industry experts to participate in a half-day workshop titled “Public Safety Mobile Application Security Requirements.” In this first-of-its-kind workshop, attendees shared their experience and knowledge to provide input in identifying security requirements for public safety mobile applications. APCO will explain the public safety use cases and related security topics that will be important to ensuring safe and reliable mobile apps.