This project at the University of Southern Mississippi in collaboration with Auburn University is providing students with hands-on information technology training and education in spectator sports safety and security cyberinfrastructure. The funded activity also prepares sports security professionals to use customized tools. This consists of 1) development of a set of first-of-its-kind training resources for spectator sports safety and security cyberinfrastructure including a unifed platform, a customized curriculum, and training material and 2) summer programs to train students and sports security professionals on the developed system modules and tools through exercises - including an evacuation drill. The training resources to be developed in this project will accommodate unique information technologies to meet spectator sports safety and security requirements. The National Center for Spectator Safety and Security is also working with the institutions on this project through funding from the Mississippi Office of Homeland Security and the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. This exploratory project also engages students and faculty from partnering one junior college and two community colleges.
Intellectual Merit: The project insights, experiences, and conclusions will open and foster an interdisciplinary field between information technology and sports safety and security management. The outcomes from this project will provide a foundation for further research and education efforts, and resource development in this new discipline.
Broader Impacts: The engagement of students in the development of the training resources will cultivate their advanced scientific and engineering skills in spectator sports safety and security cyberinfrastructure that can be carried forward for future advanced research, engineering and administration of systems. The customized curriculum and material is the first endeavor dedicated to the training of a special type of workforce requiring interdisciplinary knowledge between information technology and spectator sports security management. This work will continue after this project and contribute to a new concentration area currently in active preparation. Further, sports security management will directly benefit from this work. Millions of spectators will be better protected through the use of advanced technologies and by a workforce with the knowledge, skills and experience in the use of those technologies. In addition, all the resources from this project will be disseminated as open source for broad impact.
Underrepresented Groups: The PIs use proactive strategies to recruit and retention of underrepresented students in this domain. In 2009, 11% of the African American Ph.D. graduates in Computer Science nationwide were produced from Auburn University. At the University of Southern Mississippi, nearly 28% of the undergraduate student population for fall 2009 was African-American. The PIs are committed to continuing to attract and mentor students from underrepresented groups to this project.
cyberinfrastructure including a unifed platform, a customized curriculum, and training material and 2) summer programs to train students and sports security professionals on the developed system modules and tools through exercises - including an evacuation drill.The lead PI, Shaoen Wu then at the University of Southern Mississippi, developped video techniques (frame stiching) to create unified views of spectators in a crowded arena. With the Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security at the University of Southern Mississippi, the lead PI designed a curriculum and training sessions. Auburn University collaboration was sought for wireless networking. Distributed wireless cameras must transmit a video stream to a "control tower". Multiple video feeds require tremendous bandwidth in a crowed medium space. Auburn University designed a new medium access control protocol to optimize the use of the spectrum under extreme congestion. This scheme is an exponential code backoff algorithm that assigns variable bandwidth shares to competing cameras. This scheme was evaluated et found to be fairer than common Wifi protocols. This scheme will be submitted for publication to seek industrial partners to implement a prototype.
