rapidfire
Never Stop Serving A
ir Force 1st Lt. Julian Martinez, an Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) electrical engineer, was a member of the
winning seven-member team in the 2015 AFRL Commanders Challenge, which asked groups of junior personnel to design systems to detect and thwart internal base threats. In June, four teams tested their systems in a mock active-shoot- er scenario. Some of the winning team’s systems* already are being put to use and prepared for release on the market. Tell us about your approach. It’s a little bit of everything in one. We cre- ated a mobile app to report [suspi- cious people] immediately to people within their surrounding area. We came up with a gunshot detector using acoustic sensing and some signal processing. We tied in those sensors [on] a building map to a Web page, where we could pull up the indoor map and we could see where those shots were fired. We also came up with an indoor tracking
system using ultra-wideband for the first responders. It’s kind of like GPS. Right now, you’ll sometimes be in a building where you don’t have a network or GPS signal just be- cause of the way buildings are set up. Once a first responder came in … we could see them.
Mechanical devices that could quickly be
removed and inserted into doorframes fur- ther protect the door from being knocked down by an active shooter trying to get into the room. How did the judges react to your sub- mission? A SWAT team who has been working maybe 20 years said they had never seen anything like this indoor tracking solution … something that would update itself so fast and could within a meter tell you where your person was. What did you enjoy most working on this chal- lenge? I enjoyed most working on the mobile app. I’m the electrical engineer, but
I’m not really a fan of software de- sign. Going through the whole pro- cess of learning and iterative design to create an application … was a challenge, but it was a ton of fun. The most interesting thing for me was how different teams came to different solutions given the same problem.
— Willow Nero Attention! Check out these military-related entertainment offerings.
BOOK IN THE LINE OF DUTY: ARMY ART, 1965-2014 (U.S. Govern- ment Printing Office) The U.S. Army Center of Mili- tary History presents art dating from the Vietnam War through today from its collection to depict the Army in all its aspects.
FILM SUPERPOWER FOR HIRE: RISE OF THE PRIVATE MILI- TARY (Vice) Take a deep look into the world of private military companies with intelligence expert Tony Schiena. The film, winner of a Silver Lion Award at the Cannes Film
Festival, explores the ori- gins of this industry and its rise in operations.
TV ON TWO FRONTS: LATINOS AND VIET- NAM (PBS) This TV documentary explores the impact of the war on Latino soldiers and their
families, with striking photography, home mov- ies, newsreel footage, and photos. The film also ex- plores the controversy and changing attitudes and the growing Chicano antiwar movement within a com- munity divided over partici- pation in the war. MO
*online. Read more about the winning Commanders Challenge system at www.moaa.org/moaaonline. 28 MILITARY OFFICER OCTOBER 2015
PHOTO: DAN CLEARY/CLEARY CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY
Previous Page