In a lofty shared workspace in San Francisco, more than 200 developers and public safety officials recently gathered to work on developing new applications first responders. It was the first official hackathon for FirstNet, which seeks to support a comprehensive ecosystem of relevant applications for public safety as one of its goals to improve critical communications with mobile broadband access.
“It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say that applications are the lifeblood of any broadband network,” said Prathima Simha, who heads up product management & marketing for the FirstNet app ecosystem at AT&T. She added that the number of registrations and attending people in San Francisco “way overshot what expectations we had” with 233 attendees, most of them from universities around the San Francisco Bay area. Those attendees formed 29 teams to tackle challenges set up for them focused on the needs of law enforcement, firefighters, and EMS. AT&T/FirstNet had public safety professionals on-site “to provide them with some subject matter expertise, to talk to them about the … day-to-day challenges that public safety professionals face,” she added.
Some of the apps under development at the hackathon included focusing on gathering information for incident awareness, prevention and proactive response, including technology such as 3D-mapping, and chatbots with natural language processing to convert speech to text. Teams had about 24 hours to come up with a useful app, start creating it and demonstrate it.
“The goal of the hackathon was to bring the stakeholders, developer-partners and public safety professionals together so they can ideate and begin creating applications for real challenges that first responders and public safety in general have today,” said Simha. “And at the same time we wanted to raise awareness of what FirstNet is and how FirstNet is innovating for public safety across the community.”
The hackathon was held at the Covo co-working space in San Francisco. Simha said that on the developers’ side, participants seemed most excited to get down to developing, and that they were enthusiastic about “creating apps that would help save lives or help in emergencies and incidents that they usually see on TV.”
From the public safety officials, she said, “at the end of the day, their sentiment was that they were excited to see how differently and creatively the younger generation was thinking, and what came naturally for them — using different ways of communications very naturally. So that was very refreshing for the public safety professionals who were there on-site.”
William Schrier, senior advisor at FirstNet, wrote in a blog entry this week that developers will be looking at the question of how mobile data and devices can improve emergency response at a second hackathon this weekend in Indiana, for AT&T’s third annual IoT Civic Hackathon — which starts today. The topic was also the focus on a February FirstNet “innovation forum” in Houston, Schrier added, where the following categories emerged as “prime candidates for innovation in mobile technology”:
-Mapping and GIS data, to improve operational efficiency and more accurately search large swaths of land or large buildings.
-Video analytics for body-worn cameras, dash cameras and other types of streaming videos, to help agencies identify vehicles, objects and people and decide whether a situation is actionable.
-The internet of things, to improve situational awareness.
-Gateway applications for public safety databases, to enable first responders to quickly access the information they need across multiple databases.
“What we’re trying to accomplish with the app ecosystem is to drive an agnostic, interoperable environment for public safety today,” said Scott Agnew, AVP product marketing for AT&T. “Public safety is very fragmented today in the applications — meaning, there are many solutions that have very small market-share, which causes interoperability challenges when you have mutual aid situations. So the goal here is to encourage developers to develop for public safety, to make sure there are highly available, cost competitive, relevant apps in the marketplace.”
Another goal of the hackathons, he said, is to highlight the “level of partnership AT&T is willing to deliver to developers to make sure that they can create their solutions” and make sure that applications can work together and are interoperable.
“When we talk about achieving interoperability, it’s an evolution,” Agnew said. “You have an application, a lot of them, in monolithic stacks.” Such apps may not, in their current states, be able to send a certain type of message or data that works with others, and FirstNet will be certifying apps to make sure they’re relevant and perform well on the network — and also, he said, to drive interoperability. “That’s the ultimate goal. That is a long-term goal, there’s time and effort that are required to make that happen.”
Simha said that AT&T will “continue to have [hackathons] at a good pace, because the whole intention is to have this front and center in the community and pick their brains to get some creative solutions.”
