Director’s Message, Spring 2023
Dear SENTRY Community,
Together with our researchers, students, and partners, we have experienced a lot of “firsts” in the last few months. We are excited to roll out a SENTRY Newsletter and launch our new website. We saw the emergence of case studies in the areas of school safety and secure surface transportation and hosted many events to engage and learn with our partners, collaborators, and experts to make progress toward our goal of creating a Virtual Sentry Framework.
From November 30 to December 1, 2022, we hosted our 26th ADSA conference, the first hosted as SENTRY in conjunction with ALERT. The two-day conference centered around reducing the lethality of attacks on soft targets. Thank you to those who presented and attended, especially our DHS leaders from TSA, CISA, Secret Service, and CBP. If you were unable to participate, or simply want to re-live the experience, all presentations are now available online.
SENTRY also hosted its first annual Industry Advisory Board meeting on November 29, 2022, at the Northeastern University Innovation Center in Burlington. The meeting gave current and potential industrial partners an opportunity to engage in-depth with the research leaders of SENTRY and identified transition opportunities.
The first SENTRY Reconnect Workshop was held in June and focused on optimization in research and education. Thrust Leader Jun Zhuang and ADSA organizer Carl Crawford gave lectures to nationwide participants to foster the development of instructional modules to use in classrooms and promote new research collaborations.
Our first student Hackathon occurred on February 24 to 26 with the theme of protecting public spaces. Hosted in collaboration with another DHS COE, the Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency (CAOE), this event engaged student groups nationwide, including a contingent of SENTRY and Northeastern University students.
Here at SENTRY, our mission is a daunting and critically important one to help ensure the security of our homeland. I am inspired by the wealth of innovative ideas created by your collaboration so far and look forward to our next steps.