• Innovations in Port Security with UICDS is Topic of Tutorial and Biweekly Call Thursday September 27 at Noon
• Back to School Special:  UICDS 101 - Everything You Need to Know Tutorial Now Available on UICDS.us
• Great Upcoming Tutorials this Fall - Mobile App Field Observations, UICDS "Self-Demo," and UICDS Receives ATO Accreditation for Secure Network Operation
• New Version of UICDS Features and Benefits Tutorial Now Available on UICDS.us Collaboration Portal
• UICDS Mobile App Example Code Available for Android and Apple
• Become a UICDS Pilot - Yours from DHS
• Use the UICDS Development Kit to Win Contracts that Require UICDS Compliance

Innovations in Port Security with UICDS is Topic of the UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call on Thursday at Noon

The operation of our Nation's ports depends on carefully balancing competing needs: maintaining the security of these bustling economic and transportation hubs, ensuring the continued flow of goods, and ensuring that the multitude of agencies and components (police, harbor patrol, owners, businesses, etc.) involved in port security and operations can perform their daily activities.  The

UICDS serves as the middleware for various information sources and port incidents, allowing the CREATE researchers to focus on the modeling and analysis of risk.

Leading our discussion is Michael D. Orosz, Ph.D., Assistant Director and Lead, Decision Systems Group, Computational Systems and Technology, Information Sciences Institute, Viterbi School of Engineering, at the University of Southern California.  He will describe plans and performance of PortSec for risk-based analysis of security countermeasures to reconcile the seemingly opposing goals of minimizing the risk of terrorism while maintaining unimpeded flow of daily port activity.  

The challenge in undertaking these risk assessments and

The PortSec display shows the port map, resources available, and risk assessments and locations.

resource allocation analyses is that transport nodal points such as seaports are complex, composed of many components with varying degrees of dynamic interaction. 

Dynamically changing inputs from local data sources need to be factored into developing the current risk status, the results of which then must be provided to the port security managers and jurisdictional responders responsible for managing the risk in a cost-effective manner and appropriate action initiated.

CREATE has designed around UICDS as the transporter of this dynamic input data as well as the publisher of analytical results.  Eventually, PortSec will incorporate the experience of other UICDS implementations that have shared information from sensors, incident logs, personnel management, dispatch systems, video surveillance, common operating picture, and mobile applications.  The demonstration on the UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call will show how PortSec and UICDS will:

• Receive data from sources such as ship arrival information from Los Angeles Marine Exchange, local transportation conditions from Caltrans and other local networks, up-to-date intelligence information from sources such as iSARs or the JRIC, etc.
• Establish an incident event in UICDS that is then used to assess risk status to the ports' critical infrastructures, ships, terminals, etc.
• Share allocation decisions as well as current operating picture (COP) - vessel locations, traffic, risk assessments are recorded and shared to authorized partners via UICDS
• And provide actionable information to the POLA/POLB security officers, the respective control rooms, and the 13 jurisdictional agencies responsible for the ports complex 

So call into the tutorial and the always interesting "Open Mic" portion of the call where the UICDS participants take over for comments, questions, and updates.

Join the UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call on Thursday at Noon ET

Call: 800-366-7242    code 735108

You can join the online meeting from your PC or mobile device.  

Web Collaboration: Click here. 

... If requested, enter your name and email address.
... If a password is required, enter the meeting password: uicds2012
... Click "Join." 

If you must manually enter the URL into your browser, select the UICDS Biweekly Call and use the password above when you link to:

Back to School Special:  UICDS 101 - Everything You Need To Know About UICDS Tutorial

Our most recent UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call highlighted Fall's "Back to School" feeling by taking a lesson-by-lesson look at UICDS, the free information sharing middleware from the Department of Homeland Security, Directorate of Science and Technology. 

We summarized more than two years of previous tutorials to describe all the major components of UICDS, both operational and technical.  

Learn how you can implement UICDS to fill your information sharing gaps.  Whether you are government or a private sector infrastructure, UICDS is the single most comprehensive way to share information - secure and by agreement, exactly the right information to coordinate your emergency planning and response.

The tutorial was the one-stop-shop for UICDS knowledge, taught in 10 lessons. 

• Lesson 1:  Why You Need UICDS
• Lesson 2:  Meeting Your Information Sharing Need With Common Operational Data
• Lesson 3:  Traditional Data Sharing vs. UICDS - No Contest!
• Lesson 4:  UICDS Middleware as the Integration Layer
• Lesson 5:  How to Make Common Operational Data Common to All: Data Exchange Standards
• Lesson 6:  Technical Overview:  The UICDS Core, Adapters, Work Products
• Lesson 7:  Use Cases of Content Management Through UICDS
• Lesson 8:  A Network of UICDS Core-to-Core   Two-Way Data Exchange
• Lesson 9:  Let's Talk Data Security and Control
• Lesson 10:  Now It Is Your Turn:  Implement UICDS and Solve Your Information Sharing Problems

This is truly the best way to get started with UICDS - whether you are technical or operational - you get a jump start on implementation.  Each lesson included a reference to documents or prior tutorials captured on video and available on the UICDS Collaboration Portal.  

UICDS recently received the Authority To Operate (ATO) on one of the Department of Homeland Security secure networks.  This Certification and Accreditation (C&A) process delved deep into the inner workings and code of UICDS and into the implementation policies and procedures. UICDS passed with flying colors, in part because development follows the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Level 3.   The CMMI is a process improvement maturity model for the development of products and services created by Carnegie Mellon University for the Department of Defense certification for which is now managed by the Software Engineering Institute.  It consists of best practices that address development and maintenance activities that cover the product lifecycle. Join us to learn more about the C&A process and how UICDS achieved this important accomplishment.

UICDS Self-Demo

This tutorial will provide you with all the information you need to see what UICDS can do.  This is live data being consumed by a UICDS Core from several different applications.  You will be able to actually use a number of applications to see the data and interact with it.  Thanks to the wonderful participation of some of the UICDS Technology Providers, you will be able to use live versions of their software to see UICDS data.  These include a video aggregation application, mobile apps, a utility outage response application, plus commonly available geospatial visualization tools like Google Earth.  So join us for this tutorial and walk away with the ability to use UICDS at your desk or on your phone.  

New Version of UICDS Features and Benefits Tutorial Now Available on UICDS Collaboration Portal

The release of UICDS Version 1.2.1 is fully discussed in a recent UICDS Tutorial and Biweekly Call that describes how you can upgrade to this new version - or start your UICDS implementation at the most capable UICDS ever.  

The tutorial highlighted features of the release including backward compatiblity, improved performance in off-nominal network environments, and aligning the UICDS AdminConsole with the Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.  In addition to these changes to the UICDS code base, the significantly simplified UICDS installation was demonstrated live on the tutorial.

In addition, we improved UICDS performance in off-nominal environments focusing on UICDS core-to-core connectivity in the presence of intermittent network availability.  There is now greater assurance that UICDS Work Products are shared reliably between UICDS cores by incorporating several connection checking features.

In order to facilitate the administration of UICDS by people with disabilities, as guided by Section 508, the UICDS Team incorporated text equivalent labels to the UICDS AdminConsole elements and enabled keyboard-based access to the AdminConsole, among other enhancements.

Finally, on the tutorial, the UICDS Team showed the significantly reduced UICDS installation process. Demonstrated live on the tutorial was the UICDS InstallKit installation which had its internal processing commands reduced from 108 to 18 and the human interaction during the installation reduced to 3 entries.  The entire installation took under 10 minutes and was greeted by great applause from those "old hands" among UICDS Technology Providers who understood the value of this new release.   

View the UICDS Version 1.2.1 Introduction Tutorial on the UICDS Collaboration Platform at UICDS.us.

Become a UICDS Pilot - Yours from DHS