Good Chance You’re Going to Save Lives

Host: Deepak Saini, Media Relations Chief, Science and Technology Directorate, Department of Homeland Security

Guest: Anthony Caracciolo, Program Manager, Science and Technology Directorate, Department of Homeland Security

[00:00:00] Anthony: The feedback I’ll get from responders is, ‘Thank you for the work you’re doing and thank you for listening to me and thank you for, you know, taking my input and applying it.’ The biggest mistake we can make is we develop something without their input, and then it just misses the target. 

[00:00:15] Dave DeLizza: This is Technologically Speaking, the official podcast for the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, or S&T as we call it. Join us as we meet the science and technology experts on the front lines, keeping America safe.

[00:00:28] Deepak: Welcome to Technologically Speaking at S&T. I’m one of your hosts, Dee Saini. Today I’m thrilled to introduce Anthony Caracciolo. Anthony leads innovative research and development projects that empower our first responders in the field so they can help strengthen public safety. Welcome, Anthony.

[00:00:45] Anthony: Hey, Dee how you doing?

[00:00:47] Deepak: Good, how are you?

[00:00:48] Anthony: Good, good.

[00:00:48] Deepak: Thank you for being here. So, Anthony, I want to talk about off the top, your last name Caracciolo. Italian, it’s powerful. You know what I love about Italian names in general is when you say them, it comes from like the gut and your chest. And you say them with such passion.

[00:01:06] Anthony: That’s because we have so many vowels.

[00:01:08] Deepak: What were you like as a kid, did you have a favorite subject in school? Were you more creative, or did you always know you would fall into more of the science and tech?

[00:01:17] Anthony: No, it’s um, yeah, I grew up in New York, so it’s a big family of course. My parents had seven kids.

[00:01:25] Deepak: Oh, wow.

[00:01:25] Anthony: Yeah. And I was the sixth of the seventh in that. And they were older in age. And so, by the time they got to parenting, and I’m the sixth kid, they were…

[00:01:34] Deepak: …tired.

[00:01:34] Anthony: Yeah, tired of doing it. Been there, done that plenty.

[00:01:38] Deepak: They probably have the older siblings help raise you for sure.

[00:01:41] Anthony: A little bit. A little bit, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, but being in New York City, so there was a lot of, how would you say, unsupervised time and um, yeah, so I joined the Air Force when I was 20.

[00:01:50] Deepak: Thank you for your service. And I understand you have a brother who was a police officer in New York, as well. How did having him in your family and his experiences help shape who you are and what you bring to the table at S&T, as well?

[00:02:07] Anthony: Right. He served 20 years as a New York City police officer, and it goes back to the parenting thing a little bit because he’s, he was 10 years older than me. And I could remember walking past his girlfriend’s house on the way to junior high school. And sometimes he would pop out and be like, “You better be going to school and not…” You know, what’s interesting now for me in supporting first responders, and I don’t bring it up a lot with them, it’s only after I get to know individual police officers that I’ll mention to them that, you know, I have a brother that’s a retired police officer. And it, I don’t want to say it gives you complete street cred, right? Because it doesn’t, but it, it’s, it starts making a connection with those officers. And what’s important about that is making that connection to them, they get comfortable with you and really revealing and getting your insight of how their operations go.

[00:02:59] Deepak: Yeah, because it shows them that you get their world, or you have a better understanding than the average everyday American who may not be as closely affiliated. What do you hear from first responders in terms of maybe the dangers that are increasing in their jobs, perhaps in the cities and the neighborhoods and the environments that they have to work in?

[00:03:20] Anthony: What we don’t realize is the environment they do work in is very dynamic from a lot of different aspects. And one of the things I did, just recently completed, is a community police academy in Fairfax County where I live. And part of what I did, that was to learn what they’re learning, right? We actually get the, go the test track and see how they drive and the rules they apply. Then we go do a test range, and then we do a ride along with them.

[00:03:47] Deepak: Yeah. I, I did a ride along in my past life as a journalist, as well, and what I found fascinating was how quickly they have to act like a human computer. It’s like they’re having to do ten different functions and I’m sure a lot more. Very quickly, very fast, all while trying to stay calm under pressure. So, I feel like that was so invaluable for you because it helped you better understand them. 

[00:04:11] Anthony: And our job now is how do we make their job more effective for them, and how do we make it safer for them? So, one of the things we developed, and it’s going to transition to, hopefully to commercial market soon, is DepLife, is detect the presence of life. When we build a prototype, we’re trying to account for everything that responders might need. But when you actually talk to them and give them the device and say, “Here, use it,” right, and – which we’ve done in national field assessments, “Here, go use it” – and when they come back and say, “All I need to know is someone in that room,” right? “I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles, but all I need to know is someone’s in that room. And most importantly, I can rely on that information to be accurate. So, when I go in that room, if it’s telling me it’s empty, it better be.”

[00:04:57] Deepak: So, DepLife stands for detect presence of life. It’s specifically designed to help first responders easily and safely identify if someone’s in the building, like, like you mentioned earlier when a direct line of sight is not an option. To clarify, it doesn’t show you like literally who they are just, it just gives you a sort of a motion detection, right?

[00:05:20] Anthony: That’s right. It’s, what it does. It’s, so it’s using a standard radar that transmits through, let’s say a typical interior wall. And what it does is, whatever’s in the room, it could be furniture, a person, that radar energy hits it and bounces back. And then it actually gives you on a, on a screen, it is just like a blob or a straight line of here’s the energy coming back. So, there’s no details to it. It uses motion to determine if there’s life in the room. And what I mean by that, because most of the items in a room are static, right? It’s furniture, a refrigerator, right? That, so if the energy bounces off that and it’s not moving – a human, even if they’re trying to, stay still breathes. And DepLife, the technology will tend, will detect that motion, your chest going up and down. I feel like this is a great innovative technology, especially for, let’s say a firefighter comes across a building, it looks really dangerous to get in. Before they even bother going in, they could really quickly be able to tell if there’s a sign of human life in there or perhaps someone’s pet. And then Yeah. Yeah. That’s… 

[00:06:24] Deepak: Fascinating.

[00:06:26] Anthony: The current technology, you have to place it up against the wall and it has to be stationary, right? Because you’ve got to remember, this is a motion detector and the detector itself cannot be experienced in motion. It can’t be in movement to make accurate detections. What we’ve asked MIT to work on is, alright, can we get these detectors to actually work properly while they are experiencing motion while they’re moving themselves? We’re doing a testing and evaluation event to see if MIT has met this goal. Let’s say we have the detector on a drone. It’s in the air, but it’s not flying around. It’s in a stationary position. And any, if it experienced any movement from wind and stuff like that, it doesn’t affect the operation of DepLife. And another prototype they’re testing it on is a handheld one where, and a responder would, let’s say, pull out the device and point it at a wall that he is interested in or a room. And his own movement from his own breathing and moving around won’t affect it, right? He, it’ll still work properly. And so that’s where we’re at today, for the next phase, which we call major movement, potentially let’s say the drone is actually moving around. It’s airborne and flying, and it’s flying around the building. And this is where now we start to expand the use case of this technology. Not just from handheld, I gotta put it up against the wall, but if I can mobilize it and we get it on a drone, or I or the officer or fireman is walking with it, right? So, let’s say I’m a firefighter. One of the first things they did when they get to a scene is one is get water on the immediate fire. But two is do an assessment, 360 assessment of the fire. An officer normally does that can we put this technology on a drone and they can start scanning the building from the outside, right? To see if they start detecting people. Right now, if I have the presence of life technology in the drone, can I actually fly it into a building, right? If I have an active shooter, can I send it in and look for where everyone is, right? Because not only can I find the active shooter individual themselves, right? But now can I start finding, locating people that have been shot and injured? Because in those events, people usually die because they don’t get treated. And if you could get a responder to them to treat them, there’s a good chance you’re going to save their lives. So, this is where this technology, if we keep on advancing it could really change the tools that we put in respondent’s hands, right?

[00:08:51] Deepak: Yeah, no, that, that sounds great. The, this DepLife technology is great for law enforcement when they’re encountering situations like breaching operations or searching for trafficked individuals, hostages. And it seems like with the drone capabilities. if we can get it to that point, we can probably do a lot more with it.

[00:09:09] Anthony: Yes. And that’s the whole idea, right? If we could give them a tool that they don’t have to personally dedicate an individual responder, then that really extends their reach, right? Because it’s, I could get a drone up and circle a building a lot faster than maybe a person, right?

[00:09:26] Deepak: What’s great about this technology is that it’s true and tried. I understand there were multiple field assessments last year. There were six federal, state and local law enforcement agencies across California and Texas and South Carolina that tested this out and provided feedback. I’m sure that also helped perfect it to get to a closer state to transition and commercialization.

[00:09:50] Anthony: It really did because the two California units we had was LA SWAT and LA HSI. And they have been with the program for a little while now. They were really familiar with the technology, their ops tempos, right? When you look at the types of ops they’re doing, it’s quite different than the two units we had in Texas was the Texas Department of Safety. We had their criminal investigation unit, and we also gave a couple of units to the Texas Rangers. And then when we look at the South Carolina units, it was the county of Richland and then also the state law enforcement division – or SLED as they’re called. And they did, the construction out of California is a lot of stucco. When you look at South Carolina, they were manufactured homes that had exterior metal frames or siding, and this technology doesn’t work through metal, right? It’s just metal just blocks, so seeing the results from South Carolina versus California to Texas was really invaluable. A lot of it had to do with the user interface, too. What’s their showing up on the screen, how easily do they take it out of the box and use it? I know with the California SWAT team, they also gave it to new recruits, to new people and say, “Alright, here’s the manual. See if you can operate it.”

[00:11:01] Deepak: And what is it like for you and your team? Knowing that this is going to be commercialized and see the light of day.

[00:11:11] Anthony: It’s pretty gratifying. It’s one of these things where, when I first joined MCS this was one of the activities I inherited. And we actually modified the contract to add the national field assessments and other events to improve the product. And knowing that we’re taking it that far. And then, and I think when we look at responders, especially that are using it, and the feedback we get from them, it’s like, oh, they love it. And some of them already want to buy it, right?

[00:11:44] Deepak: That’s amazing to hear.

[00:11:45] Anthony: Yeah. And it is, and here’s the thing about developing technology. I could develop the greatest toaster in the world, right? But if it’s not bought for whatever reason, then it’s, it just, there’s a hollow feeling. If the respondent didn’t quite trust it, yeah, it’s good, but not good enough. They wouldn’t buy it because it’s their personal safety.

[00:12:07] Deepak: 100%. And what’s great about this tool that it helps law enforcement meet their needs in terms of being able to detect if something or someone is inside of a building, but then you’re working on another technology that can actually really help them tremendously once they’re inside. And that’s MappedIn. So, think of like indoor map navigator software. So, this helps first responders create, update and maintain a digital warehouse of 3D floor plans that they can access on their tablets and mobile devices. So, instead of having to look at a paper map or trying to scramble to find one, this is all digitized, right? And it’s 3D. Can you talk to me about like how did this, how did the idea for this come about and what was it like to work on MappedIn?

[00:12:53] Anthony: Right. Yeah, you know. This came from, actually initially from firefighters because if you’re familiar with firefighters, then you know they’ll have binders and binders of floor plans. And they do that, they use them for their preplanning. So, when they, firefighters will go to buildings and inspect them, and they’re not just inspecting them to see if they’re compliant, but they’re also mapping them out saying, “Where are the water hookups? Where is the electrical distribution box, the control center?” They look at that building. If I respond to a fire in this building, I’ve got to know the building. I got to know where everything is that I need to do the job right, to put out the fire now. And so the requirement was, let’s take that binder and digitize it. Let’s digitize it. Make it easy for them. Now, on top of that, and I actually was having this conversation with the team at MIT was that if I could put DepLife on a drone, could we put MappedIn and DepLife on a drone? So, one of the things MappedIn has done since our development was taken hard copy floor plans, a picture of a floor plan, or you already might have a digital file of floor plan, and what they have added is lidar So with their, your iPhone. It has lidar. You could go into a room and map it with your iPhone. Instantaneous mapping right there. Yes. And one of the things I’ve talked to MIT about, I said, wait a minute. What if we put DepLife on a drone? And I put MappedIn on a phone and maybe let’s say infrared technology on a drone. Not only can I map the outside, let’s say, I take that drone into a building, and I am using MappedIn, I could map out as the drone is flying, where, what is the scene, the hallways, door. So, I go into a room, it can map it out, but even, let’s say I, I’m in the hallway, I’m mapping it out. And before I go into a room, do I use DepLife to detect if someone’s in that room or not? And then if I have infrared technology on that drone, I could show the firefighters where the hotspots are. So, my vision is, I have a drone with all this different mapping technology, detection technology, so that before a respondent goes into a building, whether they’re police or firefighters, they could start mapping out from the exterior of a building. That is my eyes and ears, because another technology we developed and we’re currently doing is two-way communication on a drone.

[00:15:13] Deepak: Bellbird. 

[00:15:14] Anthony: Yeah, Bellbird. While the drone is flying, it’s one thing for a drone to, to land on the ground, shut off its propellers and then you can have a two-way conversation. What we’re working on is the drone is actually flying. That noise from it is pretty loud, but you can still conduct two-way communication. My crazy vision, and I say crazy because putting a lot of different capabilities on one drawing is not easy. So, we have the tech, the presence of life, right? And if I do come across someone, can I speak to them? Can they, one, can I get more information from them? Because I’m having a two-way conversation with, or let’s say they’re hurt, could I actually start having them administer first aid to themselves? If they’re, if they’re conscious and everything. 

[00:15:54] Deepak: Yeah, that can help.

[00:15:55] Anthony: Or I could give them direction saying, “Hey, here’s how you get out of the building.” The buildings on fire, they don’t know where to go. Could the drone now communicate to them, lead them out of the building, right? So, “You’ve got to follow me,” right?

[00:16:06] Deepak: That’s a great grand vision to have. So they can quickly and efficiently get through buildings. I understand that schools are…

[00:16:13] Anthony: Yes. Yeah. Glad you brought that up. One of the things the company MappedIn has done is make the basic mapping services free to responders and schools.

[00:16:24] Deepak: This can help first responders communicate with folks on the ground from the air, right? So, if you imagine like maybe a large speaker or a microphone. Anthony, I suppose this would be helpful in terms of, let’s say there’s a huge music festival and there’s a huge emergency, right? This might be an easy way for first responders to communicate, perhaps maybe safely exiting or something like that.

[00:16:50] Anthony: Indeed, you’re exactly right. The initial requirement was for crowd control. It wasn’t specifying specific solution, it was just saying, “Hey, submit your ideas on crowd control.” If you want to hold anyone responsible, accountable for obeying your instructions and directions, you’ve got to make sure your communications is reaching everyone. And the current technologies were on the ground with, right? And so, they weren’t reaching everyone. So, the idea was, put that loudspeaker on a drone, now you can reach everyone. And one of the things we learned from responders is that the use cases for those capabilities were quite different. Where a loudspeaker, it’s really just one-way communication. And a drone is flying up high. It could be up 200, 300 feet up to protect itself, because if it’s flying really low and you’re at a demonstration, people are going to throw stuff at it. Try to take it out. So, it, what we learned is you have to be up high, which means you can’t do two-way communication because you’re just too high. But at the same time, on that same drone, we had two-way communication. Now, the two-way communication worked well, but we realized the use cases for that were quite different and required a different drone. 

[00:18:00] Deepak: I see.

[00:18:01] Anthony: And what’s significant about that, it actually makes commercialization possibilities better because instead of trying to put all capabilities on one drone, all communication capabilities on one drone, my crazy idea of putting up all this stuff on one drone can be quite difficult, right? Because not everyone that buys a drone for crowd control purposes is going to want two-way communication. Two-way, we’re taking that further, development where we’re now, we’re going to do national field assessment.

[00:18:30] Deepak: Yeah. No, that, that sounds great. You have a handful of great technologies that you’re working on. Out of all the things that you have your hand in, like what do you find the most interesting and impactful about these technologies being developed? Helping first responders to be safer, more efficient, so they could save more lives.

[00:18:48] Anthony: Right. What’s interesting is in the first responder world, our path to success is commercialization versus if my customer base was CBP or ICE, I have another DHS component. And, and if I hit the target for them, they might be able to afford something that’s more expensive versus…First responders, if I see DepLife out in the field in two years, it’d be like, you know what? I had a part in that.

[00:19:15] Deepak: Yeah, and you’re doing impactful work. What advice do you have for someone that’s interested in a career with first responder technologies.

[00:19:22] Anthony: Really listen to your customers. Understand it’s not just the tech, it’s the, you have to earn their trust, not just as you as an individual. They want to, right. They’ve got to trust you as an individual that you are listening to them. That you are taking what input you are asking for and actually really applying it. The feedback I’ll get from responders is, “Thank you for the work you’re doing, and thank you for listening to me and thank you for taking my input and applying it.” The biggest mistake we can make is we develop something without their input, and then it just misses the target.

[00:19:57] Deepak: That’s a really good point, and I like the fact that you’re bringing up trust because, not only do first responders have to trust that this technology is going to really immensely help them in the field and do their jobs better, but the public also has to trust that these technologies are being used in fact, for that reason, to help them, to save them.

[00:20:20] Anthony: Right, right.

[00:20:21] Deepak: Anthony, there’s another technology that you’re working on that’s in the very early stages called Contactless Vehicle Stoppage. So, I’m thinking of like a on-off mode that a police officer can use to stop an adversarial vehicle in the field. Perhaps there’s a police pursuit or perhaps it can stop a truck driving into a crowd. But can you paint the picture about how this technology came to be and its purpose?

[00:20:50] Anthony: When you look at vehicle pursuits right now, from law enforcement standpoint, in order to stop a vehicle, it’s, they have to have some kind of physical contact, whether they’re fish bowling in a car, putting out strips and all that. And a lot of times in high speed chases, those tactics result in injury fatalities and property damage. So, what actually law enforcement’s been doing over the years is reducing or changing their tactics when it comes to pursuits, and they’ve been backing off. They only carry out pursuits when there’s a high risk of injury or I have a dangerous person that’s in the car. We’ve got to stop them now because they’re going to go on and continue causing harm or damage. It’s active. So, police have been backing off on the search on vehicle pursuits just because of the negative impact. Government agencies have been looking at these, at a technology or what they call high powered microwave energy, where you transmit energy at a target and you disable the electronics in the, in that target. You, you overwhelm the electronic circuits in a vehicle and that disruption stops the vehicle. It shuts it down. That technology initially was huge. It was gigantic. You could put it on a trailer or a big boat, right. And that the technology, through a lot of it, through DOE, ourselves, we invested where it’s getting much smaller. So, what we’re doing now is investing in how do we size that down even further? So that police can actually use that kind of technology against motor vehicles. And recently we just merged in the Coast Guard’s requirement for small vessels like jet skis and small boats because they have the same problem is how do they stop people, on the sea, how do they stop them? Because it’s their tactics, right now for Coast Guard is, they have to get up really close to the vessel they’re chasing and shoot the engine. And that’s pretty dangerous, right? Especially if you’re on the wide water with waves and all that. And you could turn real sharply and all that. So the tactics are not effective, very effective, but they’re also very dangerous to the Coast Guard personnel. But the technology itself has really transformed over the last, let’s say six years to where it’s gotten much smaller. And when we look at the power that we’re looking to transmit, it’s a lot lower. But the basic technology is, and I like to say it is you know, we transmit, this energy gets coupled into the vehicle’s electronic circuits, and it just causes a seizure and those circuits. And when that happens, those circuits, the components that are supported by those circuits shut down. They go into like a reset mode, and they shut down. And that’ll shut down the engine then, and that will bring the vehicle to a stop.

[00:23:30] Deepak: How accurate can this be pinpointed by an officer? Is there a possibility they can accidentally stop the engine of another vehicle?

[00:23:42] Anthony: The stage we’re at right now is we had a proof of concept demonstration back in 20, late 23 that the technology does work, that it, it can be effective. How far away do they want to be? How narrow of that transmission beam needs to be. And we’re thinking is pretty narrow. But we’re entering that phase where now we’re going to build the prototype to test that. Your question is exactly right. What happens if you’re on a highway and there’s two vehicles besides the target vehicle? What do you do? You don’t want to take out all the vehicles, right? So, one of the things we’re going to work out is what’s the range? Because like I said earlier, we’re not looking to transmit, even though it’s called high powered microwave energy, we’re not looking to transmit a lot of power because what happens is the collateral damage not just other vehicles, it’s infrastructure that’s surrounding the area or what happens if someone’s wearing a medical device, right?

[00:24:34] Deepak: So that’s part of the phase of research that we’re entering into is, build those prototypes and start figuring out that stuff, start fine tuning those operating parameters, and that’s the importance of following through with the R&D pipeline, right? There are a lot of steps that have to be taken to make sure that the prototype and the use case is actually technologically sound in the end, and it’s going to serve the purpose that it was intended to.

[00:25:00] Anthony: We’re getting the initial prototype hopefully commercialized. And then we talked about working with MIT to get them this tech to work when they’re in motion, hopefully it gets commercialized, but then now we’re working on the next gen, right? Hopefully, we’re making it better, and it opens up the use cases. DOD has invested millions of dollars into this contactless vehicle stoppage technology. And we’re leveraging that. The technology’s pretty mature now. It’s just about applying that technology maybe in a new way

[00:25:29] Deepak: Yeah. 

[00:25:29] Anthony: Sometimes it’s, it takes a while. To see that idea bear fruit and it’s a simple idea, right?

[00:25:36] Deepak: Yeah. It takes a lot of time, care, effort, energy. And what’s great about your partnerships with DOD, Coast Guard, other agencies is that if you can build an amazing product, they might be able to adapt it to meet their needs as well. So the whole of government sort of partnership effort really is fruitful when it comes to serving the American public.

[00:25:59] Anthony: It’s not just transitioning the technology to, for someone else to commercialize it. I want them to be successful. And that’s why I try to put them in the best position to do that. 

[00:26:08] Deepak: Anthony, it’s been great speaking with you. It’s been fascinating to learn about all the different types of first responder technology you’re working on that can help them do a much better job in the field, keep them safe, Anthony Program Manager for S&T. Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate your time.

[00:26:25] Anthony: Dee, thank you for the opportunity and it’s been a pleasure discussing these activities with you and thank you very much. 

[00:26:31] Dave: Thank you for listening to Technologically Speaking. To learn more about what you’ve heard in this episode, check out the show notes on our website, and follow us on Apple Podcasts and YouTube, and on social media at DHS SciTech. D H S S C I T E C H. Bye!