Blake Dowling: Can AI help protect our kids?

As we hit the halfway point of 2023, artificial intelligence has been the most interesting news item of the year.

Once the dust settles, the stories and opinions for and against AI range from apocalypse to utopia, with reality most likely falling somewhere in the middle.

While ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence are wreaking havoc in our schools regarding plagiarism concerns, another AI tool is bringing an additional level of safety to our learning institutions.

Artificial intelligence is now used to help administrators and law enforcement with the terrible problem of active shooters.

Several companies lead the charge in this space.

Zero Eyes is one of the big ones, and they have started to make their presence known in Florida. The company was founded in 2018 by former special forces operators, and their mission is to bring advanced technology & artificial intelligence to help combat active shooter incidents.

Their tool is compatible with existing security cameras and deploys AI to scan and audit all security feeds for weapons. The audit is done 24/7 by an artificially powered scanning tool, and it knows all firearms and does not take a break, does not rest, constantly scans, and once it detects something, it provides an alert.

Providing security teams, faculty and law enforcement with faster threat identification, in turn, speeds up response and threat elimination while saving lives.

Several schools in Florida will be rolling out this technology to help protect students. Hernando County School District in Brooksville has deployed the technology. And here in the Capital City, Leon County Schools will soon roll out the same Zero Eyes solution at the high school level for Leon, Chiles, Lincoln, Godby and Rickards schools.

Combining this tool with other artificial intelligence technology like social network analysis and facial recognition software will bring an army of computers to the fight. Clearview AI is one of the leaders in the facial recognition space. Due to privacy concerns, most private entities In the U.S. cannot use their platform — except for law enforcement.

There are many opinions on this topic, as you can see from the “ban it” site, plus you can see if your police force is using it.

According to the team at Zero Eyes, there are no privacy concerns as their software is designed to detect one thing and one thing only — weapons. 2022 was the worst year on record for school shootings, with over 300 incidents.

This figure includes any act of gun violence on campus. If you look back at the numbers, in 2010, there were only 15 school shootings.

Opinions vary greatly on how to stop violence in schools and how to get to the root of it.

Until society gets there, it’s time this kind of technology became the norm to protect schools. The idea of computers and artificial intelligence assisting doctors, lawyers and law enforcement with complex situations and speeding up the process is what I assumed AI utilization would look like.

Collaborative artificial intelligence is an effective way to describe the teamwork of people working with AI for the betterment of humanity and ultimately saving lives.

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Blake Dowling is the CEO of Aegis Business Technologies. He can be reached at [email protected].