US gov’t calls for biometrics tech for first responders; Army building data trunk line

U.S. Homeland Security officials want to hear about biometric technologies for urban first responders.

The department’s Science and Technology Directorate request for information wants to help get developing and completed technologies into the hands of first responders quicker.

Responses are due by March 25 because the directorate hopes to have relevant tools to demonstrate during its Urban Operational Experimentation program’s exhibition in July and August in New York.

Coincidentally, Defense Department officials are talking this week about how they want to harness AI and machine learning to coordinate and effectively share, across the entire U.S. Army, the gigabytes of data available from biometric and other sensors.

Biometric sensors — notably facial recognition — today are in weapons and communications devices as well as reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence hardware.

It was 9/11 that showed disaster planners worldwide how fatally flawed it is to depend on disconnected, overlapping and competing information systems in major emergencies.

The Army is developing its Joint All Domain Command and Control, or Jadc2, which would include the AI and machine learning management structure.

Remarkably little attention is paid to the challenge of moving, securing and sharing biometric and other data in the directorate’s request for information.

DHS officials have listed 11 technology categories they are most interested in seeing during OpEx 2022, the Urban Operational Experimentation exhibition this summer. The areas are detailed in one of the RFI’s appendices.

Suffice it to say most of the categories would be hospitable homes for biometrics systems, including video content analysis; situational awareness platforms; unmanned aerial systems; robotics; and fixed, body-worn and hand-held sensors.

Biometrics from ImageWare were approved for first responder network FirstNet last year.

Article Topics

AI  |  biometric data  |  biometric sensors  |  biometrics  |  data sharing  |  DHS  |  national security  |  RFI  |  U.S. Army  |  video analytics