On 27-28 August 2024, NIST’s Smart Connected Systems Division hosted a workshop at the George H. W. Bush School of Government and Public Service in Washington D.C. to examine an approach to “Whole Community Preparedness for Smart Cities and Communities.” The purpose of the workshop was to consider a concept first articulated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of a national “whole community approach” to emergency preparedness and determine its applicability as a component of community resilience and infrastructure security within smart and connected communities.
The goal of the workshop was then to define a structure for community safety, security, economic vitality, and overall community resilience through integration of advanced technologies into city operations and infrastructure. The workshop brought together a team of senior first responders, emergency managers, researchers, smart city practitioners, and city, state, and federal authorities to provide perspectives on current and future requirements for enabling communities to more capably manage complex threats to public safety, health, and community welfare. In addition to the Smart Connected Systems Division organizers, the workshop included representatives from FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (DHS S&T), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of State’s Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary (STAS), the NIST Engineering Laboratory’s Community Resilience program, and the Public Safety Communications Research Division (PSCR) of the NIST Communications Technology Laboratory. Over the course of the two-day workshop, attendees participated in structured discussions and break-out sessions to define the acceptability, feasibility, and general structure of an integrated communications infrastructure to support community disaster planning and response and to improve multi-agency crisis communications among local officials and leaders.
The effort to develop a technological foundation for whole community preparedness is a priority for smart cities and communities and reflects goals established in the NIST GCTC Strategic Plan to define holistic key performance indicators (H-KPIs) and future requirements for enabling communities to more capably manage complex threats to critical infrastructure and public safety, health, and community welfare.
Work is in progress to distill the discussions and findings from the workshop, and a summary NIST Workshop Report will be published early next year.
The Smart Connected Systems Division (SCSD) has published the final version of a long-range strategic plan for the NIST Smart Cities Infrastructure program and the Global Community Technology Challenge (GCTC). NIST Special Publication 1900-207 was the culmination of a nearly two-year collaboration between NIST research staff and over 30 members of the GCTC leadership, who represented over 200 communities, cities, non-profit organizations, private sector businesses, and research institutions that have participated in GCTC collaborations since the program’s founding in 2014. From 02 February to 31 March 2024, the draft document was posted for public comment on the SCSD website and received additional input that broadened the collaboration and helped to refine the document. The final version is now available through the NIST publications website.
More than simply a federal program guide, the GCTC Strategic Plan describes a vision for the national smart cities movement as it has evolved over the last decade. This vision has become apparent not only in the NIST research program, but also through the numerous smart cities conferences, workshops, federal and state agency initiatives and research efforts, and a host of urban and rural technology development and integration efforts nationwide. Five objectives were established for the GCTC and articulated in the Strategic Plan:
Support the smart city movement by nurturing integrated, multi-disciplinary research in strategies and technologies across technical, jurisdictional, and geographic boundaries;
Identify and address capability gaps and challenges and assist in developing frameworks, analytic methods, and resources to build a scientific foundation for smart cities and communities;
Facilitate collaboration with federal, state, county, and municipal partners to define and validate technology requirements, metrics, and standards for enhancing community services and operations;
Engage with international partners and allies to enhance cross-border interoperability, international standards development, and mutual objectives for environmental sustainability and resilience, economic growth, and common values for sharing the benefits of advanced technology integration; and
Sponsor opportunities for enhancing programs in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) and other interdisciplinary educational programs to engage the next generation of scientists, engineers, technologists, community leaders, and citizens while contributing to local and regional workforce development goals.
Over the last decade, these criteria have come to characterize the manner in which smart cities and communities have collaboratively engaged to integrate advanced technologies to benefit their communities and improve the quality of life for their residents.
As the NIST Smart Cities program and GCTC continue to evolve into the dynamic future we all envision, these objectives should continue to guide cities, communities, and organizations in building a more secure, efficient, and equitable society.
NIST researcher Dr. Edward Griffor has contributed to recent dialogs on the role of Internet of Things technologies to advance future healthcare. For a podcast, Griffor was interviewed by Dr. Rod Rodriguez-Fernandez, Global Health Advisor, Wellness & Mental Health of International SOS (ISOS) on the topic of integrating IoT in future Healthcare technologies for improved global delivery of Emergency Medicine (EMS) and clinical care under austere conditions. Griffor and Rodriguez discussed applications and challenges associated with the use of IoT devices and infrastructure, including:
Challenges to merging and contextualizing patient data across instances of care
Improving quality of care through continuous monitoring of patient status and response to treatment
Implementing an integrated healthcare taxonomy as a widely accessible “database” to align future standards and to enable predictive diagnostics
Use of AI/ML driven predictive analytics for global disease evolution and progression
Integrating design and development of medical IoT with advances in biochemical foundations
In addition, Dr. Griffor was an invited Medical Internet of Things (IoT) panelist at a Palo Alto Meeting of medical experts and technologists on Future Healthcare, held on September 13-14, 2024. Healthcare is evolving rapidly, with innovations creating both challenges and opportunities. In this gathering, experts in the field met to share insights and explore strategies needed to stay ahead in the ever-changing landscape of global health.
Griffor discussed the integration of IoT in future healthcare for improved clinical and post-release care. In his remarks, Griffor emphasized pressing questions about the future of healthcare:
How will AI reshape patient care?
How might this change with the integration of IoT technologies?
Can IoT help to reduce expenditures on healthcare?
Griffor described the cost of healthcare as being $4.5 trillion or $13,493 per person in the U.S. in 2022 — while countries like Japan, Germany, and Denmark achieve healthcare outcomes with less. He also discussed IoT applications and challenges for future healthcare including:
Healthcare professionals’ concerns about automation, e.g. Pressure Control Ventilation interpreting exhalatory pressure as patient breathing effort
Improving quality of care through wearable devices for continuous monitoring of patient status
Implementing an integrated machine learning (ML) taxonomy to align pre- and post-clinical care standards
Predictive diagnostics for cardiac medicine
Assuring AI/ML analytics for assessing disease evolution and progression, e.g. demonstrating reduced readmissions for exacerbated heart failure patients
Griffor had previously held a joint workshop with EU and U.S. medical and technology experts at the Gdansk University Medical School (GUMED) in May 2024, and he is working with GUMED biochemists and Stanford Medical Center Cardiac ICU practitioners to devise novel computational models of signaling and metabolic pathways.
NIST researchers released a publication, NIST Internal Report (IR) 8534 "Feature Description for Assessing Autonomous Vehicle Performance," which introduces a structured framework for describing and evaluating the performance of autonomous vehicle (AV) features. The framework aims to ensure that AV features are described and tested consistently, with precise specifications for the intended functionality of the feature, the desired behaviors or on-road performance, and the different factors that influence vehicle performance.
The framework introduces key components for assessing AV feature performance, including established elements like SAE levels of driving automation, operational design domains (ODD), and behaviors. It also includes new concepts such as the NIST-developed Operating Envelope Specification (OES) and behavior specifications, which are measurable specifications of the feature’s driving environment and intended function that can be used for performance assessment. Together, these components provide a systematic approach to defining, measuring, and validating how AV features perform under various conditions. The report uses the Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) feature as a use case to demonstrate how the framework can be applied to describe and test AV features.
The methodology described in this report is an important step for developing more robust test procedures for emerging autonomous vehicle technologies, ensuring that AV features are safe when deployed on our roads. This work was conducted as part of the NIST automated vehicles research program.
On Thursday Sept 26, 2024, NIST held its first Automated Vehicle (AV) Research Day as an internal celebration of NIST research in automated driving. The morning session included an opening address by Charles Romine, NIST Associate Director for Laboratory Programs, followed by invited presentations by Cem Hatipoglu, NHTSA Associate Administrator for Vehicle Safety Research, and Ed Straub, SAE Director of Ground Vehicle Automation.
Cem Hatipoglu outlined the NHTSA safety mission and the challenges in relating driving automation research to actual on-road safety. Ed Straub shared SAE’s present and future efforts toward standardization of driving automation technologies.
Following the presentations, NIST AV researchers showcased their projects in a poster session covering the topics of Sensing and Perception, Artificial Intelligence, and Communications. The Sensing and Perception team described work on measuring aspects of lidar camera fusion like calibration and colored point clouds. The AI team discussed object detection and classification precision, based on uncertainty measures, and shared experimental results demonstrating the variation in precision resulting from these driving conditions. The Communications team described a framework for assessing the added safety benefit of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications to safety-critical maneuvers and presented NIST capabilities in running experiments using V2X hardware and simulated vehicle networks. An additional poster was presented by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI), an external partner of NIST in AV research, that highlighted their physical test track for on-road testing.
AV Research Day closed with on-road demonstrations with the NIST-instrumented “development mule vehicle” on the NIST Gaithersburg campus, with rigorous attention to safety. There were demonstrations for all three topic areas of sensing and perception, AI, and communications which were followed by attendee “ride-alongs” using the vehicle.
The security and stability of the United States’ national manufacturing and critical infrastructure supply chains are vital to the health, security, and growth of the economy. As global supply chains become more complex, the need for enhanced traceability of goods and materials is crucial for identifying potential disruptions, improving risk management, and ensuring the authenticity of products and components.
One of the main challenges facing supply chain operations in national critical infrastructure sectors is the lack of reliable mechanisms to capture and link product pedigree and provenance information. Without this data, it is difficult to detect patterns of adversarial attacks, assess risks effectively, or ensure that supply chain events—such as manufacturing, shipping, and receiving—are securely recorded and verifiable.
In response to these challenges, NIST researchers, working with the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, have published the initial public draft of NISTIR 8536: Meta-Framework for Supply Chain Traceability. This draft outlines a framework that allows stakeholders to record, link, and query supply chain event data in a secure and verifiable manner. The Meta-Framework is also intended to provide stakeholders with the tools necessary to discover, understand, and trust the supply chain data they retrieve. With improved visibility, organizations can better identify and respond to potential disruptions or threats, thereby supporting the resilience of critical infrastructure sectors. As supply chains grow more complex, this framework offers a flexible and scalable solution to safeguarding the essential sectors that underpin the nation's economy and security.
To gather broad feedback from industry, government, and academia, comments on the initial public draft are being accepted until November 15, 2024. Your feedback is vital to refining the framework, helping ensure it meets the diverse needs of stakeholders and strengthens the security and resilience of supply chains.
Additionally, a webinar is scheduled for October 28, 2024, from 2pm to 4pm eastern, to discuss key aspects of the framework including the proposed traceability ecosystems, data types, and manufacturing event structures. A notification for the webinar was distributed via GovDelivery. Registration details, along with further information about the project, can be found on our project page (https://www.nccoe.nist.gov/projects/manufacturing-supply-chain-traceability-using-blockchain-related-technologies#project-promo). The page also includes a link to download the initial public draft of NISTIR 8536 and an option to join the project’s community of interest.
