Large-scale crises challenge the ability of public safety and security organisations to respond efficient and effectively. Meanwhile, citizens' adoption of mobile technology and rich social media services is dramatically changing the way crisis responses develop. Empowered by new communication media (smartphones, text messaging, internet-based applications and social media), citizens are the in situ first sensors. However, this entire social media arena is unchartered territory to most public safety and security organisations. In this paper, we analyse crisis events to draw narratives on social media relevance and describe how public safety and security organisations are increasingly aware of social media's added value proposition in times of crisis. A set of critical success indicators to address the process of adopting social media is identified, so that social media information is rapidly transformed into actionable intelligence, thus enhancing the effectiveness of public safety and security organisations - saving time, money and lives.

The healthcare sector is exploring the incorporation of digital solutions in order to improve access, reduce costs, increase quality and enhance their capacity in reaching a higher number of citizens. However, this opens healthcare organisations' systems to external elements used within or beyond their premises, new risks and vulnerabilities in what regards cyber threats and incidents. We propose the creation of a Security Assessment as a Service (SAaaS) crosslayered system that is able to identify vulnerabilities and proactively assess and mitigate threats in an IT healthcare ecosystem exposed to external devices and interfaces, considering that most users are not experts (even technologically illiterate") in cyber security and, thus, unaware of security tactics or policies whatsoever. The SAaaS can be integrated in an IT healthcare environment allowing the monitoring of existing and new devices, the limitation of connectivity and privileges to new devices, assess a device's cybersecurity risk and - based on the device's behaviour - the assignment and revoking of privileges. The SAaaS brings a controlled cyber aware environment that assures security, confidentiality and trust, even in the presence of non-trusted devices and environments.

The NATO research task group IST-118 titled “SOA recommendations for disadvantaged grids in the tactical domain” is addressing the challenge of implementing the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm at the tactical level by providing guidance and best practices in the form of a Tactical SOA Profile. The group will conduct identification and feasibility assessments of possible improvements of the Tactical SOA Profile, over a series of live and emulated experiments. In this paper, we describe our first experiments in applying SOA Web services to mobile nodes that are connected using Wireless Broadband Mobile Networks (WBMN) in the tactical domain. The experiments involved components provided by various nations, including radio hardware equipment, the Publish/Subscribe messaging service and NATO Friendly Force Information (NFFI) (as our functional service). We measured the system performance at service and physical (radio) levels in the presence of network disruption. We conclude by presenting the results of the experiments and a view of future work.

Today's “connected soldier” is both the source of and destination for electronically transmitted data used by an ever growing range of battlefield information services. In much the same way as the demand for new video services has driven innovation in the consumer domain, the acquisition and dissemination of high resolution Full Motion Video (FMV), either for surveillance and intelligence gathering purposes or to provide immediate situational awareness, is becoming an increasingly important component of NATO's C3 collaborative working taxonomy. However, the bandwidth-intensive, delay and loss intolerant nature of high resolution FMV transmission means that there are still challenges in transmitting over disconnected, intermittent and limited (DIL) networks such as those often found in tactical edge radio networks. This paper proposes a robust video streaming service, as part of a service oriented architecture for DIL tactical networks, that is based on the newest H.265 video encoding standards. The proposed service uses H.265 specific unequal error protection and selective packet dropping to ensure that the most important packets (in terms of image quality and decoding robustness) of a video are successfully delivered. The results of a comprehensive empirical evaluation show that the proposed video streaming service delivers a video quality improvement of up to 2.1 dB Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) over H.265 streamed with no UEP support. Additionally, it also demonstrated that the H.265 proposed service requires an average of 39% less bandwidth than the current H.264 video encoding service recommended in STANAG 4609, while delivering video of a similar perceptual quality.

The Internet of Things (IoT) potentials to transform our modern society into smart environments that facilitate living and boost all types of transactions are becoming more and more evident as the number of interconnections between the physical and the virtual world keeps increasing. Cyber-physical systems, wide end-to end connectivity and handling of big data are some of the mainstream concepts brought forth to materialise the IoT umbrella. Yet, emergency services, a domain of paramount importance to society, reveal multiple challenges for the adoption of applications that capitalise on the capabilities of smart devices and the interoperability among heterogeneous platforms. In this paper, we present the continuing work [4] on next generation automated (nonhuman initiated) emergency calls by specifying the pathway to implementation of NG eCall and sensor-enabled emergency services.

The adoption of smart environments is becoming more and more important in many applicative scenarios such as healthcare, asset management and environmental monitoring. In emergency services, there are very attractive use cases presenting several scientific challenges that must be addressed in order to satisfy user requirements, which are mainly focused on emergency management. The main goal of this work is to share two use cases depicting emergencies where the use of telematics and smart devices enables improved emergency situational awareness for citizens and emergency services, thus empowering emergency services to attain increased effectiveness and performance.