SDO Emergency Services Coordination Workshop (ESW06) 


Background

Summoning police, fire department, ambulance or other emergency services in case of emergency is one of the fundamental and most-valued functions of the telephone. As telephone functionality moves from circuit-switched telephony to Internet telephony, its users rightfully expect that this core functionality will continue to work at least as well as is has for the older technology.  New devices and services are being made available which could be used to make a request for help which are not traditional telephones, and users are increasingly expecting them to be used to place emergency calls.  However, many of the technical advantages of Internet multimedia require re-thinking of the traditional emergency calling architecture.  This challenge also offers an opportunity to improve the operation of emergency calling technology, while potentially lowering its cost and complexity.

Existing emergency services rely exclusively on voice and conventional text telephony (known as TTY in the United States) media streams.  However, more choices of media offer additional ways to communicate and evaluate the situation as well as to assist callers and call takers to handle emergency calls.  For example, instant messaging, wideband speech codecs and video could improve the ability to communicate and evaluate the situation and to provide appropriate instruction prior to arrival of emergency crews. Future emergency services will allow the creation of sessions of any media type, negotiated between the caller and PSAP using existing SIP protocol mechanisms (see RFC 3264).


Motivation

Today many standardization activities take place with regard to various parts of the emergency service architecture. They are, however,  not as coordinated as they could be. There is the danger that  uncoordinated activities lead to solutions that either do not work in some circumstances or to solutions that lead to duplicate work due to lack of knowledge of work done by other SDOs.

Early July 2006, the 3GPP CT1 and the IETF ECRIT working group have organized a  joint session on emergency calls. This meeting was organized by Hannu Hietalahti (3GPP TSG CT chairman),  Hannes Tschofenig (IETF ECRIT) and Marc Linsner (IETF ECRIT) and turned out to be fruitful to accomplish a better understanding of each others architectural understanding. This meeting has motivated us to get in touch with other organizations in a similar fashion.


Scope & Agenda

This workshop is restricted in scope to citizen to authority communication. The main topics for discussions will be:

We are particularly interested to see how various organizations and groups tackle (or plan to address) these challenges. 

The organizers are currently preparing the workshop agenda based on the received presentation and paper abstracts.
Please find a rough agenda here.

Please find the timeplan here.

Slides can be found here.

Remote participation is also possible:


Goals

 The goals of this workshop are:

As a final goal of the work on emergency service standardization we want to accomplish interoperablity. This meeting should move us a step closer to this goal.


Meeting Venue

The workshop will be hosted by Henning Schulzrinne at Columbia University/New York.
Columbia University is located at 116th and Broadway in Manhattan. Further information can be found here: 
http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/visitor_info.html
and
http://www.campustravel.com/university/columbia/

The meeting will take place at the Davis Auditorium on the 4th floor (campus level) of  the Schapiro Center for Engineering and Physical Science Research (CEPSR) except for Friday morning, when we will be in the Interschool Lab, in the same building, 7th floor. 

For directions, see http://www.cs.columbia.edu/resources/directions/
A map of Columbia university can be found here.

A few pictures of the event can be found here.


Meeting Date
   
Two day workshop on the 5th and 6th October 2006. 
The meeting will start with breakfast at 8am, the workshop starts at 9am and will finish around 6pm. On Friday, 6th October, we plan to finish also at 6pm. A welcome reception is planned for Thursday evening.


Accommodation

The following list provides a selection of hotels recommended by Columbia University:

*Union Theological Seminary's Landmark Guestrooms  Rate Approx. 125 per night.
3041 Broadway at 122nd St.                          total 25 guest rooms
New York, NY
1-212-280-1313

Amsterdam Court Hotel            Sept - Dec. $199.
226 West 50th Street
New York, NY                     Columbia ID CUO6
1-888-66-hotel

Ameritania Hotel                 Sept - Dec. $199.
230 West 54th Street
New York, NY                     Columbia ID CUO6
1-888-66-hotel

*Flatotel                        Sept - Dec. $239.00
135 West 52nd Street
New York, NY                     Request Columbia Rate
1800-352-8683
http://flatotel.reachlocal.net/

*Hotel Beacon                    Sept - Dec. $165.00
2130 West 75th St.
New York, NY
212-787-1100 ext. 623            Request Columbia Rate
http://beaconhotel.com/

Hotel Belleclaire               Sept - Dec. $189.00
250 West 77th Street
New York, NY                     Request Columbia Rate
1-212-362-7700
http://www.hotelbelleclaire.com/

*On the Ave                      Approx. $189.00
2178 West 77th Street
New York, NY
1-212-362-1100                   Request Columbia Rate
http://www.ontheave.com/main.htm

**The Lucerne                     Sept - Dec.  $185.00
201 West 79th Street
New York, NY 1-212-875-1000 or                 Columbia ID: 119
1-800-492-8122
http://www.thelucernehotel.com/index.shtml

Alternatively, Expedia might be useful to find an appropriate hotel nearby Columbia University.


Meeting Organization

This meeting is planned as a public workshop. Due to the number of expected participants we require indication of attendance by September, 23rd 2006  October, 2nd 2006 by registering at http://edas.info.
   
In order to structure the discussions the organizers require titel and abstracts to be available by September, 16th 2006. Please indicate the title, the abstract and the expected length of the talk. Final presentation slides and full papers have to be available by September, 30th 2006 October, 1st 2006. The EDAS system will also be used for uploading abstracts and papers. The EDAS workshop webpage can be found at http://edas.info/4971.  

Papers will be published in the workshop proceedings and will be made available (if unlimited distribution is allowed) through the conference web page.

Each participant will be charged a small fee (100 USD) for food and drinks (for breakfast, lunch, reception, and breaks) whereby the payment will also be provided via the EDAS system.


Organizations/Groups

Invitations have been sent to contact persons of the following organizations and groups:

You can find the current list of participants here.


Workshop Organizers

Hannes Tschofenig (IETF ECRIT)
Marc Linsner (IETF ECRIT)
Hannu Hietalahti  / Atle Monrad (3GPP TSG CT)
Henning Schulzrinne (Meeting Host)

Last modified: 5. October 2006
Last updated by Hannes Tschofenig