When the Tokyo Marathon was held on Feb. 26, major security firm Secom Co. lifted a balloon equipped with cameras from a building near the finish line in front of JR Tokyo Station and deployed vehicles equipped with a radar system that can detect drones. The building stands at 35 meters, and the balloon, connected with a wire from the roof, was equipped with two kinds of cameras, one with a zoom lens and another showing thermal images, according to Secom adviser Tsuneo Komatsuzaki. In addition, the firm deployed vehicles equipped with radars to detect drones, as well as cameras worn by security guards and stationary cameras to monitor the entire area. "We identify suspicious individuals and predict how the crowd moves next, helping us to prevent an accident," Komatsuzaki said. Public and private entities are beefing up surveillance to combat terrorism amid the ongoing debate in the Diet over a conspiracy bill to punish people for just planning to conduct serious crimes.

We describe an innovative application of a novel game-theoretic approach for a \textit{national scale} security deployment. Working with the United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA), we have developed a new application called GUARDS to allocate the TSA's limited resources across hundreds of security activities to provide protection at over 400 United States airports. Similar security applications (e.g., ARMOR and IRIS) have focused on one-off tailored applications and one security activity (e.g. checkpoints) per application, GUARDS on the other hand faces three new key issues: (i) reasoning about hundreds of heterogeneous security activities; (ii) reasoning over diverse potential threats; (iii) developing a system designed for hundreds of end-users. Since a national deployment precludes tailoring to specific airports, our key ideas are: (i) creating a new game-theoretic framework that allows for heterogeneous defender activities and compact modeling of a large number of threats; (ii) developing an efficient solution technique based on general purpose Stackelberg game solvers; (iii) taking a partially centralized approach for knowledge acquisition. The scheduling assistant has been delivered to the TSA and is currently undergoing evaluation for scheduling practices at an undisclosed airport. If successful, the TSA intends to incorporate the system into their unpredictable scheduling practices nationwide.