Post by Ammar Bin Zulqarnain

This might be my first post in years here on this platform. I have already spammed a lot on my instagram stories about my Europe Trip (having a side career of being an travel vlogger for a week😎). But why I was there is what this post is about since I feel like sharing this achievement with my network: Last week, I got the chance to attend IEEE/ACM CPS-IoT week 2026 in Saint Malo, France and presented our paper “RESPOND: A modular platform for urban emergency response research and decision support”. Link: https://lnkd.in/eQ4aAxh5 The motivation behind RESPOND is simple: Cities are outgrowing their emergency response while the infrastructure for emergency response operations are years behind. It's a system design problem. Here's the catch: where you place stations and how you dispatch units are two halves of the same decision. But every existing tool treats them separately. Siting models assume units are always available. Dispatch systems just send the nearest truck, blind to the layout above. And you can't A/B test a fire department to figure out which combination works. So we built RESPOND: a simulation-based platform that replays real incidents through alternative station layouts and dispatch policies, turning historical CAD logs into well-defined counterfactuals. It's the first unified testbed for coupled facility allocation and dispatch, with modular components researchers can swap and a dashboard practitioners can actually use. One thing the experience reinforced for me: presenting forces a level of clarity that writing alone doesn’t demand. If you can’t explain it in a few minutes, you don’t understand it yet. Standing in front of researchers, defending ideas I’ve lived with for months, and getting questions that pushed my thinking in directions I hadn’t considered. There’s nothing quite like it. Huge thanks to my collaborators Jose Paolo Talusan , Ayan Mukhopadhyay , and my advisor Abhishek Dubey for guiding me throughout the paper and conference and grateful to our partners at the Nashville Fire Department and Metro Nashville for making this work possible. Onto the next one. #ICCPS2026 #CyberPhysicalSystems #Research