SENTRY Strategic Initiatives Virtual Workshop Series
SENTRY’s Strategic Initiatives Virtual Workshop series presents discussions on best practices, current efforts, and future possibilities to secure and protect soft targets and crowded places in the United States. The workshop engages speakers from academia, government, industry and public venue spaces to review successes, current research and threats to public gatherings. The theme of the inaugural workshop was Protecting Mass Gatherings in the U.S.
Strategic Initiatives Virtual Workshop: Protecting Mass Gatherings in the U.S. Highlights
SENTRY research guided our selection of the workshop themes addressed in the larger effort of Protecting Mass Gatherings in the U.S.
The final workshop agenda can be found here: Workshop Agenda
Transportation Security
Profs. Sam Chatterjee and Auroop Ganguly, presented on their research focused on Urban Rail Network Deterrence with Graph Neural Networks and how it can be used to enhance transportation security at mass gathering events as a tool for subway and rail transit operators to protect their soft infrastructure networks.
Crowd Evacuation
Profs. Peter Jin, Fred Roberts and Jie Gong presented on their research centered around Digital Twins in Support of Crowd Evacuation. Their current research would improve existing digital twin tools and software by developing aspects that will allow for real-time crowd simulations that calibrate for pedestrian behavior and dynamics when under threat and emergency conditions.
Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems
Profs. Jun Zhuang and Richard John described their proposed research in Assessing UAS “Threat Intent” – Friend or Foe: An AI Driven Decision Tool Leveraging MatrixSpace AiEdge and AiCloud as a system that would provide real-time assessment of drone intent (benign, suspicious or hostile) by combining behavior, location and proximity data to enable risk-informed, human-in-the-loop responses during mass gatherings.