AI Security System Facing Questions in NC School District

The New Hanover County School Board will be hosting a Town Hall to gather input from parents and the community before voting for approval on an AI pilot program.

On January 28th, the vendor, Eviden and partner company Raptor, gave a presentation to the New Hanover County School Board on implementing a $3,200,000 AI School Safety pilot system into their schools. Questions and concerns about this system were raised by attendees at this meeting and at a subsequent board meeting held on February 4th. School board member David Perry said, “Once AI comes into our schools, it isn’t leaving. We need to get the input from parents, teachers community whether we are going to do something, this is a generational type decision, this is not something we should not be entering into quickly.” Interim Superintendent Barnes wants to look at the legal, ethical, and safety issues of it. At the February 4th school board meeting the school board voted to expedite an already planned Town Hall for March in order to gather input from parents, teachers and the community about implementing this AI pilot program. The date has not been announced.

As reported earlier, NC State legislatures approved grant money for an AI School Safety pilot program for two NC school districts, New Hanover County Schools and Davidson County Schools. NCDPI will issue the $5.5 million as School Safety Grants for the program to be shared between these districts. Both school districts must comply with a list of requirements in order to participate in the pilot program. This includes integrating AI into any cameras, videos or other alerting management systems for the implementation of the pilot safety system. The AI safety system must offer the ability to perform all of the following: detect threatening objects, detect intruders, detect person down, detect open doors, tag and track, facial recognition, forensic face search and license plate recognition. Both school districts must contract with the same vendor. At this time neither school district has voted to move forward.

POTENTIAL VENDOR EVIDEN

Eviden is a business housed within French company Atos, touting $5 billion in revenue for 2023. They specialize in patented technologies, advanced computing, security, AI, and cloud and digital platforms. One AI school safety program offered by Eviden is Vyze, powered by Microsoft Azure. According to the Eviden representative at the Jan. 28th presentation, Vyze was not very receptive due to the program being cloud based, so Vyze is not what is being offered in New Hanover Schools. They will be using a product within Eviden’s Ipsotek business, including an option of an entire VISuite of addons. Ipsotek describes itself as Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Scenario-based Rule Engine (SBRE) Video Analytics software company.

According to to the Eviden representative Ipsotek is “computer vision” AI, and the AI is not being taught or learning to do something when in operation. He explained “computer vision” AI works like an identification tool similar to how Ring, Amazon, and Google type doorbells operate. The AI software is pre-trained in lab to learn what to identify; what falls looks like, what weapons/objects look like, fire/smoke, what behavior to detect like loitering, etc. There exists a chance for false-positive identifying in the situation of something not being a weapon or detecting an animal along the fence for an object that should not be there. These can be reported as false threats and the system can be taught in the future not to alert on them. So in this sense the AI system will be taught continuously and for sometime as it learns the school’s environment and behavior of the students and others. No data goes outside the school into the cloud and no data comes in. All data remains inside the school’s server. Any images captured on camera are deleted if there is no threat or qualifying event detected and videos are stored solely on the school’s camera system. The only data that leaves is sent to their partner Raptor in order to send out notifications.

VISuite AI actively monitors large networks of cameras and tracks objects in real-time throughout the scenes. Advanced trackers and AI detectors are used to maintain a track on every individual, vehicle or object to generate rich and accurate metadata unique to each object in the scene. The tracked objects shape, class, appearance, colours, speed and trajectory on a geomap (time and location) are some of the information collected and used as a feed to the Scenario-Based Rule Engine that takes a decision if an operator should be alerted to an incident or not. Besides events, this information can also used to provide statistical information and support post event analytics and forensic investigations. -Ipsotek

Raptor Technologies is partnering with the Ipsotek AI security system to provide the notification component. They have integrated software that will send communication alerts to the appropriate channels, whether it be EMS, fire or police based on the threat. Principals, teachers and parents will also have the ability to receive notifications. In addition to the notifications they have an entire suite of offerings, like school drills, searching the location of students and staff, and reunification of guardians and student. This will require sharing more data and information about students with third parties like EMS, fire and police.

Presentation slide with Raptor product.

FACIAL RECOGNITION COMPONENT

There is big concern on the facial recognition capability of this system profiling individuals and privacy. The Eviden representative said that this AI has facial recognition capability if the user wants to implement it. In order to do that a database of faces must be entered into the system. It does not have the ability or power to scan a face and know the identity or mark it as a threat without having the facial identity given to it first. For example you can load a database of sex offender’s faces into the system and it would learn those faces and then using a matching based algorithm it can alert if those faces are seen on cameras. It would be up to the school whether or not they would use the AI system in that way. This does not remove the fact that cameras are still analyzing faces to match with the algorithms that they are programmed to identify. Schools are not allowed to collect biometric data on students, this would essentially be doing that. What is to stop the school from loading student yearbook photos in as a database for the system to learn and then be able to match those faces with those within the school building or outside perimeters? There is an add-on called VIFace with many facial recognition capabilities. Ipsotek’s AI technology even offers covid-19 solutions ,like face mask detection, social distancing and contactless entry. What was not made clear in the presentation is which of these can the school district implement and will they in the future once the system is in place. Principal Anderson said he could see using this system to add faces of people he would not want inside, like someone who has been threatening a teacher. The license plate recognition works the same way, the AI will only alert on license plates that are entered in as a database.

COST BEYOND GRANT PERIOD

The AI pilot program will be funded for 2 yrs with the $3.2 million School Safety grant, after that the district will have to fund it from their budget. The estimated cost is $300-400K per year. Hardware is bought upfront, with the district owning that outright. The remaining cost is the licensing, software, and support. Software will need to be updated as this AI program evolves and learns.

No other schools in US are using Eviden. There are other AI security systems that are being used by school districts such as Rank One Computing (ROC). They have developed technology into their Safer Schools Initiative program. To start, they have rolled out the program in 54 West Virginia schools and have plans to move across the country and then around the world.

Here we see that schools are being targeted as research for big data and AI companies and it is a competition to acquire them as customers. There is no proof of concept that these AI security systems are effective in preventing school violence, unwanted intruders from coming to schools or whatever danger they are marketing to prevent from happening. The cost of implementation and maintenance has a heavy price tag that most school districts will have a hard time affording. The grant money helps, but that is temporary and unsustainable for many districts, so this is more or less just using students for advancing AI with no benefit to anyone but the tech companies.

Eviden’s revenue for 2023

CONCERNED?

If you are concerned or have questions about the AI school safety pilot program coming to New Hanover Schools, plan to attend the Town Hall. No date has been set as of now, they plan to invite Eviden to answer any questions the public may have. In the meantime you can reach out to your state representatives and school board members . Questions you can ask them can include how this AI pilot surveillance program was approved without language to include a parent’s right to give prior consent to scan their child's face using AI technology. NC Senate Bill 49, known as the Parents’ Bill of Rights, prohibits the creation, sharing, or storage of a biometric scan of children without the parent's prior written consent.

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