By Stephanie Kanowitz Mar 10, 2021 The National Institute of Standards and Technology is testing a tool that could make it easier for the public-safety community to prototype cutting-edge analytics on streaming video. The Analytics Container Environment (ACE), being developed to support NIST’s Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Division, provides a modular framework for running containerized analytics on streaming video. Essentially, it could be used to detect footage of erupting fires, fights or other emergencies that demand swift public-safety response. “If there’s a crowd suddenly gathering or a fight breaking out, or a person falls down for no apparent reason, those are important things you would want somebody to notice,” said James Horan, the ACE project lead. “Everybody says they have tons of cameras and nobody to watch them, so [this is] the idea of a detector being able to flag a camera and say, ‘Hey, there’s a fight starting on Camera 27. You may want to look at this.’”