Tag: weapons detectors

Montgomery County Public Schools will be testing an artificial intelligence weapons detection system pilot program at three schools starting in March, which was already planned before Monday’s shooting at Wootton High School in Rockville on Monday.

At a news conference with reporters Tuesday, Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Thomas Taylor indicated that Wootton High School could be added to the list of schools slated for the pilot program. The other schools in the program include Seneca Valley, Magruder and Bethesda-Chevy Chase high schools.

Dmitry Sokolowski, co-founder and CEO of the firm that’s providing the technology for the pilot program, VOLT AI, told WTOP that they had been in talks with the school system about introducing the technology.

Sokolowski said VOLT AI is not a scanner. It won’t be able to detect a weapon hidden in a backpack or gym bag.

“The weapon has to be visible,” he said.

Sokolowski said VOLT AI works along with security cameras that are already in place at schools.

Currently, Sokolowski explained, most school security cameras record images that are reviewed after an incident occurred. With VOLT AI, the footage is monitored in real time and is used to detect all kinds of incidents.

“It could be people fighting, people bullying each other, someone having a medical emergency, someone having an accident, whatever the case might be,” he said.

Then, depending on the circumstance, a designated staffer at the school would be alerted to the precise location of the incident within the school.

“The system picks that up in real time and notifies an administrator or a nurse or whoever is the right person for the right job to be notified and triage the situation,” Sokolowski said.

Sokolowski said the VOLT AI system makes sure there is always a “human in the loop.”

“Every AI identification is put in front of a human being,” Sokolowski said.

He said the company has operation centers worldwide to validate scenarios where AI has flagged a potential issue.

“Then the human being gets a chance to not only look at this little sort of image of that, but be able to replay a few seconds before and after to understand the context of what it’s seen,” he said. “That allows us to make sure that no false positives are actually sent out to the school or 911.”

Precisely how well the system can pick up images of, for example, a person with a firearm can depend on the locations of the cameras within the school, Sokolowski said. But the quality of the images available under current systems has come a long way.

“The majority of the cameras today, they’ve been installing in last five, eight, maybe even 10 years are good enough quality to identify a weapon,” he said.

There have been questions about the accuracy of similar security systems.

Sokolowski mentioned a case in Baltimore County where a 16-year-old was handcuffed after a Dorito bag in his hand was mistakenly identified as a potential weapon last year. Sokolowski called the system in that case “a little bit more antiquated” than the VOLT AI technology.

That kind of error, he insisted, is something “our system would never do, because we actually have a human component in it, verifying that this is a real incident that’s unfolding” in real time.

Sokolowski said he knows that there will be questions about privacy.

“Obviously, there’s things like locker rooms and bathrooms where nobody installs cameras,” he said. “All the customer-related data is encrypted at a customer level, so each individual customer of ours has their data completely partitioned and segmented for security and privacy reasons, and then the data that is collected on a daily basis is purged every few days so that it’s enough time if something, we missed or something that the school wants to go back to and look at, they can but after a few days, it goes away.”

Sokolowski said the pilot is being offered at no cost to Montgomery County Public Schools because “most schools that try our system really love it,” and many adopt it after the free pilot period.

In a letter that went out to the Magruder High School community dated Feb. 8, Principal Christopher Ascenzio and MCPS Chief Safety Officer Marcus Jones explained that a virtual PTSA meeting would be held Feb. 18 at 7 p.m. and a student and staff forum would be held at the school during lunch on Feb. 19.

The Feb. 8 letter concluded, saying, “No decisions about broader use will be made without careful review, privacy protections, and community input.”

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