What will be the future NFC smartphone technology landscape on college and university campuses?
“The whole idea is that anything you can do today with a key or a card, tomorrow you will be able to do that with your phone,” points out Jeremy Earles, a product marketing manager at Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies, which partnered with Villanova University (Pa.) on its advancing NFC smartphone installation.
If NFC smartphone dreams come true this year as hoped, for many schools it will simply be a matter of turning the technology up on their existing card readers. Indeed, the use of smartphones enabled by near field communication is happening on some campuses and is a near-term reality for others.
Planning to implement a biometric system on campus? Phil Scarfo, a vice president at Lumidigm, a New Mexico-based biometric company, recommends the following actions:
When it comes to access on college and university campuses, striking a balance has always posed a challenge. On the one hand is the need to limit access to those authorized to have it, whether that means students who have paid for dining services or faculty accessing labs or other facilities. On the other is the desire to make the process as efficient and user-friendly as possible.
Situations promoting campus alerts can be disruptive, but also informative. The University at Buffalo’s Joseph Brennan recalls an incident where a student reported seeing a man enter the campus library while carrying what appeared to be a rifle. Immediately upon hearing the report, officials issued an alert using the university’s system from Rave Mobile Safety. Recipients of the message were advised to stay away from the area, and the building was searched.
In an era when higher education leaders are more mindful than ever of potential threats to the safety of those living, learning, and working on campus, security planning has reached new levels of complexity. Few would argue that at least some security measures should be highly visible to the campus community. Just as in society at large (think of the police cruiser parked in the median of a busy highway), the right level of visibility can prevent campus crime or violence.
The search-based filtering techniques used by social media monitoring tools rely on spotting a specific set of keywords, including the name of the school. Since people can make valid threats using words outside that list, monitoring tools could never identify threats comprehensively.
In the wake of the Colorado movie theater shooting and noting the social media clues that appeared beforehand, college and university leaders are taking threats of violence posted to social media very seriously.
Over the last few years, high-profile laboratory incidents at major institutions have made front-page headlines. The latest resulting in the death of a graduate student at UCLA, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) decision to pursue criminal charges against both UCLA and the individual principal investigator (PI) in charge of the lab.
Changes are coming to colleges and universities as administrators look to increase efficiencies in the way campuses are secured and building operations are managed.
The House and Senate have been working to come to an agreement on the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2012. If passed, the House version of legislation will give the director for the office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) within the Department of Justice the authority to establish a National Center for Campus Public Safety.
As in any community, there will always be incidents of crime on campus. While the cause is unknown, in many categories of campus crime, the number of arrests went down between 2007 and 2009. Add unified security systems to the mix, and response to crime can be swifter and the number of victims can potentially be minimized even further.
When Scott G. Burnotes arrived at the University of Miami, he found multiple, separate systems for emergency notifications. A third-party vendor handled texting, emailing, and phone calls; sirens had been set up around campus; and some web-based notifications were utilized.
“Their focus was on continuing to build a multimodal method of communication for all types of emergencies,” recalls Burnotes, Miami’s director of emergency management.
The lecture had run late, and on top of that the sophomore biology major had joined a couple of friends for a cup of coffee afterward to kick around the speaker’s provocative ideas. It was well after midnight when he made it back across campus to his residence hall, where he noticed a side door that was ajar.
Modern technology has a lot of upsides. On the downside is the fact that you need an ID and password to access most of it. Keeping your own logins straight is hard enough; keeping them straight for thousands of people on a college campus is even harder.
