Structuring Public Safety Research Problems with Natural Language Processing

How can we design research problems to address the real needs of people working in public safety? In this session, NIST PSCR discusses the results of new work examining persistent public safety communications challenges. To better understand when technical solutions apply — and when other analytical approaches are needed — NIST conducted interviews with people working in public safety about the technologies, training, and decisions on which they rely and seek support. NIST presents the results of this work and shares how natural language processing methods allow for greater comprehension of interviewee responses. The session ends with Q&A welcoming further input from the public safety community about structuring problems in public safety so that they may be addressed effectively by researchers.