Grants

It is estimated that on average, every individual in the United States or Canada will call for emergency assistance at least twice during his or her lifetime. In a 9-1-1 call, the dispatcher first collects critical information (e.g., location, call-back number, what happened), assesses the situation, and then decides whether and what to dispatch. Once first responders (police, fire, medical) are dispatched, it takes anywhere from a few minutes to several tens of minutes before the first responders arrive. How much a person can do during the pre-arrival time is very critical.

It is estimated that approximately 600,000 people each year in the United States experience a cardiac arrest, and survival rates for arrests that occur in community settings are less than 6%. On June 30, 2015, the Institute of Medicine released a report on strategies for increasing survival rates after cardiac arrest. The report calls for effective treatment, demanding an immediate response from bystanders to recognize cardiac arrest, call 911, and initiate cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

This project, developing an instrument referred to as CloudCar, aims to build a cloud-based infrastructure to monitor and collect data about drivers, vehicles, and road conditions. The type of data to be collected includes driver's biometrics (eyeball tracking, heart rate, blood pressure, and EEG brain wave analysis), sensory data from the vehicle, traffic data, and sensed data about road condition.

University of North Texas (UNT) is supporting three cohorts for the CyberCorps®: Scholarship for Service (SFS) program from a selected list of students who are interested in pursuing a PhD in Information Assurance and are interested in serving federal/state/local agencies after graduation. UNT's PhD Program prepares students to account for both technical and social issues when addressing security vulnerabilities. UNT's program is an interdisciplinary program between the College of Engineering, College of Business, and College of Information.

The increased use of in-vehicle entertainment and smart phones (texting, talking, music, videos) increases the level of distraction of drivers and introduce new challenges for safety on the road. But, it is believed that mobile phones can also help improve road safety by sensing, sharing, and providing feedback to fellow drivers. Three first order, safety factors contribute to safety on the road: the driver, the vehicle, and the road. Mobile Life Guard, patent pending, includes all these categories in a comprehensive product.

Traditional 9-1-1 systems, which date back to 1970s, support only voice, while non-emergency communications now feature other media. Adding additional media for 9-1-1 presents opportunities and challenges. Text messages, images captured by cell phones, video clips, and automatic crash notification messages can dramatically enhance the 9-1-1 services by expediting emergency responses and reducing crash clearance times.

This project, developing a flexible instrument and tools for research to understand and analyze next-generation 9-1-1 services, contributes to the process of planning next-generation emergency communication infrastructure.

This project, developing a flexible, low-cost and high performance platform for research and training in the secure multimedia communications, aims at developing the following tools: Spam Traffic Generator, DDoS Traffic Generator, Header and Topology Anonymizer, PSTN-SIGTRAN-SIP Interface Simulator, and QoS-Security Meter. Significant risks face Voice over IP (VoIP), such as Identity management, Voice Spam, DDoS, 911 Service Availability.

VoIP, along with text-based systems such as instant messaging, is likely to gradually replace the circuit-switched telephone system. VoIP offers the promise of global and low-cost communications. However, these attributes also make VoIP a promising target purveyors of unsolicited bulk communications. Unsolicited phone calls, sometimes referred to as "spit" (Spam over Internet Telephony) can be even more annoying and disruptive than email spam. For example, such phone calls may arrive in the middle of the night or may disrupt a business meeting.

The University of North Texas (UNT) and the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) are collaborating to improve the quality and capacity of existing IA programs at the UNT and UTA, and to bring together regional academic institutions and local industry to increase the number of practical applications for IA professionals in North Texas.

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