Program
Tuesday, December 1
| 8:00 - 8:30 a.m. | Breakfast & Registration |
| 8:30 - 8:45 a.m. | Welcome & Introductory Remarks |
| 8:45 - 9:05 a.m. | Opening Remarks from FirstNet Authority |
| 9:05 - 9:25 a.m. | Opening Remarks from NIST PSCR
Dereck Orr, Division Chief |
| 9:25 - 9:45 a.m. | Opening Remarks from APCO International
Mel Maier, CEO & Executive Director |
| 9:45 -10:45 a.m. | Break / Vendors Demos |
| 10:45 - 11:30 a.m. | Keynote: Global Interoperability: Lessons Learned from the FIFA World Cup 2026™
G.B. Jones, Chief Safety and Security Officer for the FIFA World Cup 2026™ Leveraging experience from the FBI, NFL international security and FIFA, Jones' session will offer insights into how complex security programs are designed, managed and implemented for globally significant events watched by billions. |
| 11:30 a.m.- 1:00 p.m. | Lunch (on own) |
| 1:00 - 1:55 p.m. |
BREAKOUT SESSIONS
Driving Future FirstNet Investment: Where Operations Meet Opportunity Michael Varney, FirstNet Authority The FirstNet Authority has always collaborated with public safety to incorporate their unique communication needs into FirstNet. Join this session to help us understand the operational challenges that should drive FirstNet Authority investments into the network. In 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced an agreement led by Secretary Howard Lutnick that will position the FirstNet Authority to deliver more capabilities and benefits for the public safety community. Through this agreement, the Commerce Department has secured $2 billion in additional value for public safety through reduced costs and new investments in FirstNet. We invite you to participate to ensure future enhancements made through this funding are aligned with the real-world, mission-critical needs of the public safety community. The New Public Safety User Experience: Providing Enhanced Connectivity Options to First Responders This panel discussion presents a technology overview, along with the operational impact, of how modern public safety broadband devices can improve first responder communication availability and resiliency by coordinating the use of multiple connectivity options rather than relying on a single network path. The panel will focus on each of those connectivity solutions and how today’s devices can gracefully navigate across those solutions, thereby enhancing the user experience. First responders should be able to move through buildings, rural areas, tunnels, parking garages, schools and other challenging environments while their devices automatically select the best available communications path to meet their needs.
Scott Ledgerwood, NIST PSCR In scenarios where traditional display technologies may not be optimal or even sufficient for the needs of public safety, virtual and augmented reality provide first responders with unique opportunities to enhance training modules and better support their operations. In this session, we will discuss two recent NIST PSCR efforts to advance the use of XR for public safety. First, we will discuss the outcomes of a study that the PSCR team ran to quantify the benefits of using VR in training first responders for hazardous gas detection with an air monitor. In collaboration with academia and public safety professionals, NIST PSCR hosted the first workshop on XR for public safety at the IEEE World Forum on Public Safety Technology. The second part of this session will focus on this workshop, discussing the structure of the workshop and outcomes from the research community with an eye toward similar efforts in the future. |
| 1:55 - 2:05 p.m. | Break |
| 2:05 - 3:00 p.m. |
BREAKOUT SESSIONS
FirstNet Fusion: From First Impressions to Future Needs * LOCATION PLAZA F Jesse Cooper, FirstNet Authority FirstNet’s mission critical push-to-talk (MCPTT) capabilities are continually advancing based on feedback from the public safety community. This session provides an inside look at the latest features of the new FirstNet Fusion MCPTT platform, including enhanced user experience, interoperability tools, and operational capabilities. Attendees will preview technical and functional improvements planned for future releases and participate in an interactive discussion to share operational needs and priorities. Insights gathered during this session will help inform future development and investment decisions. Rural Response Modernization: Real-World Lessons from Marion County, Illinois Rural emergency management agencies face unique challenges when coordinating multi‑agency communication during severe weather and other high‑impact events. In this session, Andrew Strong shares how Marion County, Illinois leverages FirstNet, FirstNet Fusion, and a new drone program to improve real-time coordination, response efficiency, and community information sharing. Attendees will explore practical ways that small, resource‑limited jurisdictions can modernize their emergency communication capabilities. When GPS Fails: Next-Generation Indoor Z-Axis Tracking, Navigation, and Safety Scott Ledgerwood, NIST PSCR |
| 3:00 - 4:15 p.m. | Break / Vendors Demos |
| 4:15 - 5:00 p.m. | General Session |
| 5:00 - 5:10 p.m. | Wrap-up |
Wednesday, December 2
| 8:00 - 8:30 a.m. | Breakfast & Registration |
| 8:30 - 8:45 a.m. | Welcome & Introductory Remarks |
| 8:45 - 9:45 a.m. | Resiliency by Design: NG9-1-1 and North Carolina’s 9-1-1 Response During Hurricane Helene and Beyond
Pokey Harris, North Carolina 9-1-1 Board Think about the images you saw in September 2024 of washed-out roads, downed power lines, and destroyed homes across western North Carolina courtesy of Hurricane Helene. This destruction greatly impacted the critical infrastructure for 9-1-1 centers across the region, but even under these conditions, citizens continued to reach 9-1-1. Come learn how the State’s NG9-1-1 ecosystem performed under real-world catastrophic stress and how this experience inspired and continues to strengthen statewide continuity. Presenters will detail the performance of the ESInet, hosted call handling, and the statewide GIS data set, as well as highlight the North Carolina 911 Board’s additional resiliency assets (e.g., 9-1-1 call data interoperability platform, ePTT radios). Attendees will gain insight into the Board’s pre event planning, the routing partnerships that enabled seamless support when public safety answering points went offline or exceeded capacity, and the lessons learned as the resiliency strategy met on the ground reality. |
| 9:45 - 10:45 a.m. | Break / Vendors Demos |
| 10:45 - 11:30 a.m. | Operational Readiness in the Capital: Communications for Major Events and Multi-Agency Response
From presidential inaugurations to large-scale demonstrations to annual celebrations like Independence Day, Washington hosts some of the most complex and high-profile public safety events in the United States. Public safety communications are critical to maintaining situational awareness and coordinating response efforts across multiple jurisdictions and disciplines. Learn how local and federal agencies develop and execute resilient communications strategies to support daily operations and large-scale planned events in the nation’s capital. Solutions discussed will include FirstNet, mobile broadband integration with land mobile radio (LMR), deployable assets, mobile broadband technologies, and interoperability platforms. |
| 11:30 a.m.- 1:00 p.m. | Lunch (on own) |
| 1:00 - 1:55 p.m. |
BREAKOUT SESSIONS
Shaping FirstNet Central: Insights, Enhancements, and the Road Ahead * LOCATION PLAZA F Christina Wilson, FirstNet Authority Explore how your colleagues use the FirstNet Central Advanced Network Status Map to support their day to day operations and planning — and share any tricks, tips, or hurdles you have experienced with the platform. The FirstNet Authority team will guide the group through targeted questions to understand how FirstNet Central tools inform situational awareness, decision making, and resource allocation. Insights gathered will help identify opportunities to enhance usability, improve operational relevance, and better support public safety workflows. Bridging the Gap in Your PACE Plan Public safety agencies increasingly rely on PACE — Primary, Alternate, Contingency and Emergency — plans to ensure responders can communicate when their preferred system is unavailable. But a PACE plan is only as effective as an agency’s ability to execute it when conditions change, infrastructure fails, personnel are overwhelmed, or the incident disrupts the assumptions behind the plan. This panel will explore how agencies can develop PACE plans that are operationally resilient rather than simply documented. Panelists will examine real-world scenarios such as wildfires, hurricanes, major public events, power outages, network congestion, and loss of communications infrastructure — and discuss how an incident can disrupt multiple layers of a PACE plan simultaneously. From Sim to Sky: Validating Public Safety UAS Communications Stephanie Layman, NIST PSCR Public safety increasingly deploys Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) for missions such as wildland fire response, disaster assessment, and wide-area search and rescue. However, maintaining reliable communications in Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) and infrastructure-limited environments remains a significant technical challenge. In this session, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Division presents an approach to advancing UAS communications for long-range applications and ground station control reliability through integrated simulation, test method development, and live flight evaluation. Leveraging a high-fidelity simulation environment that models UAS mobility, command-and-control links, and data flows across heterogeneous networks, the team stress tests mission scenarios against key performance metrics and explores long-range link loss characteristics prior to field deployment. Presenters will connect simulation insights to real-world validation through controlled live flight testing and discuss how test methods align with responder needs. Attendees will gain practical insight into bridging modeling and field validation, establishing performance benchmarks, and advancing reliable communications for standards development. |
| 1:55 - 2:05 p.m. | Break |
| 2:05 - 3:00 p.m. |
BREAKOUT SESSIONS
The Always‑On Network: Exploring Coverage and Resiliency Needs * LOCATION PLAZA F The FirstNet Authority has made significant investments in coverage enhancements and is exploring options to enhance network resilience. Join to learn how the FirstNet Authority engages with public safety stakeholders across the nation to solicit coverage feedback and share investment progress. Then, as the team looks beyond coverage, help drive the FirstNet Authority’s exploration of potential approaches towards enhancing network resilience. The Next Technological Evolution of Emergency Communications * LOCATION PLAZA E Stephen Devine, APCO Chief Technology Officer As emergency communications transitions to NG9-1-1, public expectations for how they connect with emergency services are rapidly evolving. New digital communication platforms, messaging services and multimedia technologies create additional pathways for the public to request assistance and share critical information. This session will explore the latest NG9-1-1 developments, APCO's vision for the future of emergency communications, and how emergency communications centers can prepare for an increasingly connected environment where emergency requests extend beyond traditional voice networks and into a broader digital communications ecosystem. INSIGHT: Foundation-Model AI for Actionable Indoor Building Intelligence * LOCATION PLAZA D Alex Dimopoulos, NIST PSCR Indoor environments remain one of the last blind spots in emergency response: responders routinely enter unfamiliar buildings with no usable map. Existing 3D building scans are too large to transmit, too costly to label, and lack a common vocabulary across agencies. This presentation introduces INSIGHT, an open-source, NIST PSCR-aligned research effort that applies foundation-model AI (Segment Anything Model 3) to camera and depth data to automatically identify safety-critical building features — exits, standpipes, AEDs, utility shutoffs — and encode them as ISO 19164-compliant 3D scene graphs. This approach compresses tens of gigabytes of raw scan data into megabytes, making complete indoor intelligence deliverable over FirstNet in seconds and filterable by role, so fire, EMS, and tactical personnel each see the information relevant to their operations. Attendees will see live segmentation results, role-tailored building views, and a path toward interoperable indoor intelligence for dispatch and field operations. |
| 3:00 - 4:15 p.m. | Break / Vendors Demos |
| 4:15 - 5:00 p.m. | Inside the Innovation Trials: Safe Ears, Clear Comms, Full Situational Awareness
Standard noise cancellation makes a voice clearer by removing everything around it. In the field, that means removing the sounds situational awareness depends on: the gunshot, the scream, the chaos behind the voice. The FirstNet Authority's Innovation Trials Program starts with operational gaps like this one and evaluates emerging technology against them. A recent trial tested artificial intelligence (AI) audio enhancement inside a mission-critical push-to-talk application. The testing team worked with first responders in lab and field conditions. The evaluation was built on public safety AI algorithms and voice quality versus intelligibility research from the NIST Public Safety Communications Research Division. That work makes it clear: public safety requires purpose built, mission-critical AI, because consumer products trained in normal environments for ordinary circumstances cannot meet the reliability, intelligibility, and situational awareness demands of first responders. Join us to see how Innovation Trials translate public safety needs into focused, evidence-driven technology development — and how your input guides what we explore next. |
| 5:00 - 5:10 p.m. | Wrap-up |