Politics and Technology

The security forces necessary to protect the President of the United States and his family can be significant, but those needed to monitor and secure an event the size of the inauguration can be daunting.

Law enforcement faced a tough challenge during Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration as it was necessary to simultaneously monitor live feeds from wireless camera scattered across their jurisdictions. To overcome this challenge, Washington, D.C. required a new surveillance approach.

A new “virtual office” system, VSee, was adapted by law enforcement to overcome the bandwidth obstacles that have previously prevented simultaneous access to all of the city’s cameras. With this new technology, law enforcement was better equipped to provide the protection it promised.

As part of the Small Business Innovation Research Program, VSee was developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). A combination of hardware and software, VSee allows users to securely receive and share large amounts of information, generally within a virtual office environment.

VSee was originally created as a telework platform, yet found new application when adapted to enable security officers to watch multiple remote cameras in real-time from a single command center.

The technology developed for VSee allowed for changes to the system that reduced the required bandwidth for data streams. Now a fraction of its original size, even police cruisers were able to access the feeds via cellular networks.

The technology was developed through the Ph.D. work of Milton Chen, then at Stanford University. In his initiatives, he focused on videoconferencing and remote collaboration. "After I completed my Ph.D., my advisors and some of my colleagues who worked on the project decided to form VSee with me," said Chen, in an NSF statement.

Chen felt existing virtual office approaches fell short of their full potential and set out to find ways to capture the advantages of telework without the usual technical shortfalls and impact on the office social dynamics which put a burden on productivity.

Now, with the support of funds from NSF and other sources, Chen and his team continue to modify the software based on findings from research studies of the social dynamics of both the workplace and home work environments.

Before VSee, collaboration tools put limits on the remote work experience in significant ways. Handicaps within the system included sharing on-screen applications, limited webcam feeds and poor video, which can cloud the critical social cues necessary for remote communication.

"From a technology standpoint, what resonated most with NSF was the clever bandwidth-management enabled by VSee's approach," said Errol Arkilic, the NSF program officer who oversees VSee's grants.

Proper bandwidth management made the Inauguration monitoring possible. "VSee engineered a solution that bypasses the constraints of various communications protocols, a breakthrough that has the potential to span across many platforms, including wireless," added Arkilic.

VSee users can clearly see each other at once, work together on an on-screen document or other object, and trust that their environment is secure from intruders. In addition, the platform is on all day, with options for privacy, so it becomes a true virtual office environment.

Security applications for this technology are still new, yet the systems adoption for telework has expanded rapidly since its release in 2003. In fact, several Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies are adopting VSee for remote work or for traceless, secure collaborations.

VSee employees are continuing to refine their software, modifying it as they use it for their internal use in offices around the world. According to Chen," By focusing on the collaboration requirements of a team like ours, we aim to create a simple tool to achieve the productivity of a bullpen in a tech startup."