ZeroEyes AI Gun Detection

[00:00] SPEAKER_00:

Hey, Justin Bader here with a quick note before we get into this episode of Principal Center Radio. This podcast is almost exclusively focused on books, but I've made an exception today so that I would have the opportunity to speak with Mike Leif, CEO of Zero Eyes, which is a security company. And you'll see exactly why I've chosen to speak with Mike as we get into the show today. But before we do, I wanted to mention a previous guest that I've had on Principal Center Radio, Molly Hudgens, author of Saving Sycamore, The School Shooting That Never Happened. This is a difficult and complex issue that has numerous facets to it. And in today's podcast, we're going to talk primarily about technology and law enforcement and guns and things like that.

[00:43]

But I also want to acknowledge the mental health side and the counseling side and the human side. So look on our website. If you go to principalcenter.com and search for Molly Hudgens, H-U-D-G-E-N-S, you can find my interview with Molly about her work with a student who came to school with the intent to harm people. and ultimately did not as a result of their work together. So I highly recommend checking that out.

[01:06]

This is a difficult topic, so I understand if this is not everyone's cup of tea, but I think there are some important insights in my interview with Mike, and I hope you enjoy listening to it and get something out of it. Thanks.

[01:18] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[01:30] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Mike Laiff. Mike is Chairman and CEO of ZeroEyes, an intelligent video analytics company. He is a co-founder of the company and has previously worked at Comcast NBC Universal as the director of digital programs. He holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and spent 10 years in the United States Navy as a Navy SEAL.

[01:57] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[02:00] SPEAKER_00:

Mike, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[02:01] SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for having me on, Justin. Appreciate it.

[02:03] SPEAKER_00:

Well, I'm excited to speak with you today and take a little bit of a departure from our usual book-focused format. I wanted to talk about your company and the technology that you've developed because I think it has some amazing potential. I know it's getting some amazing results for schools, for military bases, for companies. And I wonder if you could just briefly describe what Zero Eyes is and does, and then maybe take us a little bit into the origin story of the company.

[02:29] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. Like you mentioned in an introduction, ZeroEyes, we're a video analytics company. We use computer vision models over existing security cameras to detect guns. And when a gun is detected, we send an alert to first responders, local staff and security. So now they have a picture of that person, what type of weapon they have and where they're located. So you can marshal people away to safety, stop the threat.

[02:50]

And it's really a focus on decreasing the response time, save time, save lives.

[02:55] SPEAKER_00:

Well, take us into a little bit of the origin story of the company, if you could, Mike. What did you see happening in the world, in the education profession that prompted you to, with your co-founders, start ZeroEyes?

[03:06] SPEAKER_01:

We started ZeroEyes back in 2018. And really the kind of the light bulb moment It was shortly after the Parkland school shooting. My daughter was in middle school at the time and they started doing active shooter drills, lockdown drills due to Parkland, like a lot of other schools in the United States. And she came home really upset from it. And it's a shame because like my parents grew up with nuclear fire shelter drills. I grew up with fire alarm drills and now our children are growing up with active shooter drills and it's, it's absurd.

[03:34]

Something needs to change. Everyone wants to change something. And they've been talking about it ever since Columbine back in 1999. And here we are almost 23 years later and nothing has changed. It's people say, let's offer more hopes and prayers. Let's outlaw guns, take all the guns off.

[03:50]

Well, unfortunately, neither of those are going to work right now because there's more guns than people in the United States. Even if you outlawed guns tomorrow, it is not going to make a difference. But so shortly after that, when my daughter, her school started doing those drills, I was back at her school for a sports practice and I was sitting in a gym waiting for it to be over so I could take her home. And I was looking around. I was like, there is literally a security camera. It seemed like every 20 feet in this building.

[04:12]

And I did some back of the envelope math. And I was like, there has to be 200 plus cameras in this building. They have security guards at the school and the one was walking by. I was like, who's watching the cameras? Literally laughed and was like, no one's watching the cameras. We use it for after something happens.

[04:25]

And I knew folks that were doing different technologies over security cameras, such as facial recognition, but they're facing a lot of headwinds because of privacy concerns. And I was like, wait a second, why don't we just use the cameras that set guns? Like it's an object. Everyone wants to know if there's a gun on premise. And then you could send that information just like I mentioned earlier. So now they can identify what that person looks like.

[04:46]

what type of weapon it has, and geolocate them on a map. Because when one of these events happens, 911 just gets flooded with calls. And it's a lot of misinformation saying multiple shooters, where they're located. And then when the police and first responders are coming, it could be a hundred acre campus. It's sometimes even bigger, maybe smaller, but where exactly are they going to go? They don't know.

[05:08]

We can help dial in to the precise location. And so we just want to save time and save lives.

[05:14] SPEAKER_00:

Well, let's get into a little bit of detail about how it works then, because we have cameras, we understand the concept of cameras, we have lots of experience, especially those of us at the secondary level, watching the recordings, looking for evidence that we can use to deal with situations that have already occurred. But you've taken the presence of those cameras as an indicator that we have an opportunity to do something much more proactive. Tell us about how the technology works. You said you can actually detect guns when they appear on security cameras on campus.

[05:42] SPEAKER_01:

I'll keep without going crazy technical. It's a software platform. So the security cameras are already existing. We don't go and install cameras. They're all wired. Once someone says, hey, we want zero eyes and are building our location, we go and get those security camera feeds and run to a server either at that location or we have it in the cloud.

[06:01]

And that's where our AI is scanning. Basically, it's scanning all these camera feeds at once. saying gun or no gun. And if a gun's detected or it thinks a gun is detected, it sends an alert out. But before it goes back to our clients and first responders, it goes through a human in a loop process within ZeroEyes. We have a monitoring center.

[06:18]

So people are like, no, that is not a gun or yes, that is a gun. So this way our clients don't receive false alarms. And going back to kind of what you mentioned earlier, one person can't watch a security camera feed for like more than like 10 minutes, maybe 20 minutes before it's like, I can't do this anymore, or they're looking at their Facebook or checking their phone or checking messages. This never sleeps 24-7, 365. And I think everyone wants to know where a gun is detected.

[06:45] SPEAKER_00:

So this is something that we can't afford to pay someone to just sit in every school and watch the cameras. And it's not something that cognitively we can really sustain. Like you just can't pay attention to 200 security cameras all day long and meaningfully detect things. So the algorithm is looking for things that look like guns, right? It's detecting the visual of a gun.

[07:03] SPEAKER_01:

Correct. It gets a little bit deeper than that because it's based on pixels and the way that the computer vision models, quote unquote, learn. But it's based on pixels. So it's just looking for an object. We're not doing anything like facial recognition. We're not collecting any biometric data.

[07:16]

And our human interloop monitoring centers, they're not looking at live camera feeds. It's only looking at... one keyframe image that comes through that it thinks is a weapon. If it is a weapon, we dispatch it through and it goes through the process.

[07:29]

If it's not, it's gone. We look at it as a no-brainer. It's a proactive measure where you can really shift the timeline to the left.

[07:37] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Let's talk about response times a little bit because certainly any staff member could call 911. And in a lot of situations, as you said, multiple people call 911, students call, they text their parents, their parents call 911. What kinds of shifts in response times do you see when people start using zero eyes to proactively identify threats and contact law enforcement directly?

[08:00] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So just recently we're running drills. They're actually one of our first customers, but we go back and they put on big drills every year to train their local first responders and police and even some teachers for these types of events. So they ran scenarios. They had like full day scenarios. It was like actors, everything involved.

[08:19]

It was really big event. They ran half the drills without the software. And then when they implemented the software, they're seeing at a minimum across a board, like a 50% reduction in response times. Literally it's life or death difference. If you think about it, like if you could get there even a minute sooner, it makes a difference. But when you're talking shaving response times down in half, Because the way you think about it now is without zero eyes running, something happens at a school.

[08:45]

Shots are being fired. At first, people are going to be like, what is that? Was that a dumpster unloading something? Did someone just drop a cabinet? Did a cabinet fall over? It's just a loud pop, pop, bangs.

[08:55]

No one thinks gun. As soon as people realize it's gun, the fight or flight kind of kicks in. They sit there for a second like, oh my God, I'm scared. What do I do? People kind of freeze. handful of people might be like, oh my God, I have to call 911 right now.

[09:07]

But you're already 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 120 seconds into this event unfolding. They're speaking to the 911 operator and it's like 911 operator says, you know, 911, how can I help you? And they're just like, probably trying to whisper because they're hiding. Hey, We have an active shooter. Okay, where are you located? At such and such high school or campus.

[09:28]

Okay, but where? It's very hard to get that information across and clearly communicate it to the people that are responding. This way you have zero eyes. One, you have the opportunity to detect this before shots are even fired. That would be a perfect scenario for us. and then but say shots are already fired you still need to know what that person looks like and where they're located at when you're responding to help decrease that response time but then you push the alert through now 911 operator and a local staff are looking at it like oh it's a 510 white male on the northeast corner of the main building first floor appears to be carrying an assault rifle that information that actionable intelligence is critical for first responders to stop these threats

[10:10] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk a little bit more about what unfolds when someone comes on campus with the intent to harm. There are a number of different stages that unfold and a number of different steps that schools can take to become, I guess, more hardened or more responsive at each of those stages. Just walk us through an incident, if you would, where someone comes on campus intending to harm people.

[10:30] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, we could take some real world examples. So go back to Sandy Hook. Sandy Hook, he was in a vehicle, pulled up to the front of the school in the fire lane, got out of the vehicle, took a gun out, walked up to the front door. Hey, guess what? The doors were locked. What do you do?

[10:45]

He stood back and shot through the first set of doors, stepped through, got to the next set of doors. They were also locked, shot through them. And then he made his way in and went into the first classroom. Situations like that, it's terrible. It's so unfortunate. You think about Parkland.

[10:59]

Parkland, he hid it into a bag, walked into the school, sat in a stairwell, and it's on video camera for a minute and a half. He takes the gun out. He's mentally preparing himself. Another student walks by and he tells him to get out of there. And then he finally gets himself worked up to go do this. He steps out in the hallway and pulls a fire alarm and starts engaging with the students.

[11:19]

But there was so much chaos from that that cops thought were responding over to the stadium, thinking that there was a shooter in the stadium because he was shooting out windows towards kids running to the stadium out of the building. Yeah, Buvaldi, he... crashed the truck way outside the school grounds, crossed the street, moves his way through the parking lot, firing shots outside. But with the way the noise goes from shots being fired, it can be very confusing when it bounces off buildings.

[11:44]

So the security officer on campus went to like a different spot And then he made his way into the building. It's very unfortunate. But you see these people typically time and time again set up a staging area. They're not professional police or special operations people from the military or professional soldier. They're amateurs, but they're taking equipment and weapons, acting like this is their job. But all they want to do is do harm and are trying to psych themselves up.

[12:10]

So they set up in a staging area. And this is a time where we love to catch them so we can help them.

[12:15] SPEAKER_00:

Let's talk a little bit about a scenario where a smaller gun is concealed in a bag, either a large bag or a small gun in a backpack, something like that. What can schools do and how does that unfold to respond to a situation like that?

[12:27] SPEAKER_01:

Well, good security, it's tough for schools, right? All these superintendents, school officials, it's very difficult because they have a balancing act of too much security, making it feel like a prison or still making an environment that's conducive to learning and kids don't feel like they're locked down. And so you have to find a balance. Good security comes in layers. So like it's not one thing that's going to fix this and the active shooter mass shooter problem in the united states there's a whole spectrum that people have to cross everything from mental health all the way over to the other side of gun laws and everything in between to really attack this problem head on a small gun being concealed in a bag zero eyes will not pick that up what can pick that up is other types of companies that have like the metal detector type of scanners etc if that gun is already in a bag and that person's coming in campus trying to get into campus Once they're in a classroom or they go into a bathroom and they pull that gun out to go do harm, like what we saw at Oxford up in Michigan, that person went and took the gun out and then worked their way through the hallways shooting and shot multiple people.

[13:27]

Well, a few months after that, we got in touch with Oxford. We're like, hey, we'll put it in your school for free. You can go test it out. And if you think that it would have helped in that scenario and it would help in future ones, let's do it. We'll work this out. But let's come up and prove it to you.

[13:40]

And they're one of our customers now. worked really closely with them. And even the police, once they saw it, they're like, why isn't this everywhere? I'm like, I think it should be. If you think about it from, 15 times more people die from gun violence in the United States every year than they do fires. But yet every school building, federal building, commercial building you walk into has a fire suppression system, a smoke detection system, et cetera.

[14:02]

I really think you'll see, I don't know if it's gonna be three years, five years, eight years, it's gonna be the norm on security cameras within the United States. And it's just unfortunate because it's where we're at as a society.

[14:12] SPEAKER_00:

great way to use technology to really speed up those response times. So if someone is in a hallway, say, you know, schools have lockdown procedures, you know, as soon as we know we can issue the call to, you know, everybody lock your classrooms, you know, cover your windows, hide, that kind of thing. So certainly there are still opportunities once someone is inside the building to still secure classrooms and cut down on any further damage that could happen. Talk to us a little bit about your monitoring team, because they're not watching every camera in every school. There aren't enough people on earth to do that probably, but they are getting alerts from the AI to look at and then take us into maybe a little bit about who they are, what their training is like, and what they do to get law enforcement response quickly.

[14:55] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so we put a very heavy emphasis on recruiting in a company in general, but specifically for a monitoring team, veterans and former law enforcement. So everyone that's sitting in our monitoring center is a former veteran of law enforcement. They've already been places overseas, or even if they're law enforcement here in situations, high stress, they have to make decisions quickly, totally understand what it looks like to look for a gun, look at not just the object that's being blown up and identified as a gun, but what's going around in this scene? What's really happening here? Because we get a lot of alerts that come in where it's people with airsoft guns, the gel blasters that are out there, et cetera. And you don't want to go sounding a five fire alarm drill for that and have a very heavy response when you can just be like, it's obvious that that is...

[15:45]

Yes, that's someone with an airsoft gun and a school, which we see a lot. They shouldn't be there with that. So we handle that differently in a monitoring center. And it's key to have those veterans and folks in our monitoring center that can handle that. So we set up all of our training scenarios around what would happen if it looked like this? What would happen if it was real gun?

[16:04]

What would happen if it's a fake gun? What happens if it is a real gun, but the alert's not getting pushed through? What's the decision tree look like? Who are we calling? And we work all that out with our clients too. And so they love the 24-7, 365 support.

[16:18] SPEAKER_00:

Could we talk for just a second about things that are not real guns? Maybe they're kind of a gun, maybe they're a toy gun, maybe they're a pellet gun. These are the things that we don't really think about because typically kids know not to bring them, but apparently they do still in large numbers bring things like that to school. What's going on with, you know, those kind of gun adjacent or gun like things that can show up on video?

[16:37] SPEAKER_01:

I was really surprised as we started growing across schools, how much we saw that in schools. Like this past year, there was a big TikTok challenges going on amongst students and they would call it senior assassin day. So you'd be assigned someone like you're assigned Joe Smith or whatever seniors breaking out the names. And then you have to quote unquote assassinate them by a certain date. So you're expected to do it with like a gel blaster type gun or an airsoft gun, but they would like want you to video record it. So these kids were doing it in schools, like thinking they were funny and we're like, Not a great time in the world to be doing something like this.

[17:10]

So we would see that quite a bit. When those come through, though, it's very obvious to what's going on in the surrounding. Like you see people smiling, you see people laughing. We also got ones where a lot of kids were holding self. So there's an app that you could download to your cell phone that makes a gunshot sound if you hold the cell phone in your hand like a gun. That would trip up on our thing, but you notice it in the monitoring center.

[17:31]

It enhances the image for us. We're like, yeah, it's obvious it's a cell phone. There's nothing going on there. We've seen a lot of that. When we first went into, it was in New Mexico. We're across many schools in New Mexico, but we're only installed there for a week.

[17:45]

And it was right after school hours. Someone came by a security camera on a skateboard, but they had a pistol in their hand and it was all black. We're like, oh, wow, that's looks like a Glock. And then it came by the camera again or like holding it up. And we were like, But there was no one else. There was no other contacts.

[18:01]

There was only one person on the skateboard on this thing. So we're like, all right, let's send it through. And so we sent it through and we always follow up with a phone call. And we're like, hey, this is what we're seeing. We don't see anyone else in the video just to let you know. Beware.

[18:14]

So they rolled up. It was a kid. He was meeting his friends after school hours to have a basically a BB gun war with airsoft guns. But. He painted over the tip, the orange tip. He painted it black.

[18:25]

They would have never known he was there if it wasn't for us. Not only that, they were able to get to that individual within like a minute and a half. And they're like, come on, you're not supposed to be on campus with a gun. Took him home to his parents. Everything worked out. But it's just one of the examples that we see time and time again.

[18:40]

We see it basically daily at Zero Eyes now.

[18:43] SPEAKER_00:

Wow. And that was a situation that could have escalated quite a bit. If a neighbor had reported a young person running around with a gun, that could have resulted in a bigger misunderstanding. There's a lot of prevention opportunity here to protect kids who are just playing in an unsafe way or just not thinking very much about the consequences of their actions.

[19:02] SPEAKER_01:

It's not only do we look at it as like helping schools think through their security and how we can help their educators. They should be focused on educating. They shouldn't be focusing on how to prevent people from entering their building with guns. But it's just the world we live in today. But it also helps the police because the police need actionable intelligence. They need to know like, oh, now we know.

[19:22]

Here's the picture of the police. Giving a picture to someone before they're walking into a building and tell them exactly where they are in a building because it's based off the camera. I didn't have that in a SEAL when I was in a SEAL team. So I would love to have that information. You're going into an unknown. As many unknowns that you can make known going into that is just going to help you do your job that much better.

[19:41] SPEAKER_00:

Mike, you mentioned earlier the idea of a decision tree and setting up with a school or a district kind of some rules about what happens in different scenarios. What could it look like if, like, let's say we do have an airsoft gun on campus, you know, probably not going to result in a tragedy, but still kind of a serious situation. Like it's going to ruin your day if you're an administrator and you have to deal with an airsoft gun. Hopefully nobody will get hurt, but it is just a very different situation. So what could that look like when, you know, not the worst case scenario comes through the system?

[20:10] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so we don't push that to the local 911. We have an integration with another company called RapidSOS, so the 911 operators could look at it. In some places, they don't use RapidSOS, so we have integrations with our software platforms. Because the 911 operator is communicating back to the police, the police are only going over radio communications. So what we do in those, we don't send it there because you're not looking for a police response on that. What you're looking for is probably if they have an SRO, a school resource officer on staff, you're calling that person and you're saying, hey, we got an alert.

[20:40]

It's obvious it's a gel blaster or an airsoft gun. And they'll be like, hey, can you just email it to me or send it to me on my ZeroEyes app? And then I'll go take care of it with that person. 99% of the time, that's the way it's handled. You don't want to go sounding the alarms and getting everyone all worked up, triggering an active shooter drill or an active shooter response that people drill for. We try to keep it simple as much as possible.

[21:05] SPEAKER_00:

So Mike, I know we've had many opportunities, unfortunately, to think about how to improve security in our schools over the past couple of decades, since the 90s when this really first came onto the national consciousness. What are some of the good, better, best steps we can take to improve security, to improve peace of mind, to make kids safer, and to let families know that we're doing everything we can to keep their kids safe?

[21:27] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's school superintendents, school officials, school boards. They're in a tough spot thinking about school security. That's not their background. Their background is to focus on educating the kids. But then now they have like a school security budget. They have first their budget.

[21:39]

It should be going to educating the kids, but you still have the school security budget. You got to think about, hey, do I have good cameras? We've gone to many schools that want our technology and we're like, hey, you should focus on upgrading your cameras first because these are from like 1995 and it's just it's not doing anything for you. You go from security cameras to a school resource officer if your district wants a school resource officer, at least in the high school or the middle school. We come in a lot cheaper than it would cost for a school resource officer, but I think having them together, it's peanut butter and jelly. One of the best combos you can have.

[22:11]

You got to think about access control and a visitor management system. They're key to being able to get good locks on doors with the good doors, just like what we saw locking doors at Uvalde. I mean, they had all those things in place, but unfortunately, you know, it still fell through the cracks. You could get those few down. I think that's the best place to start for most of these folks.

[22:31] SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. Well, Mike, if people want to maybe see a little bit of a demo, get a sense of how this all works and maybe get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to go online?

[22:39] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's zerowise.com and it's fully spelled out. So Z-E-R-O-E-Y-E-S.com and we'll get scheduled with a demo. As soon as you fill out, we'll be in touch with you.

[22:50] SPEAKER_00:

I imagine this is kind of a customized process because every campus has a different pattern of cameras and you have a team that consults with schools to figure out how to get them set up.

[22:58] SPEAKER_01:

So for us, it's almost the same across the board. We're putting in software that's pulling a security camera feed. The step in a process that always helps facilitate that is working with the district's IT team or whoever runs their IT. Once we get that communication going, it's smooth sailing.

[23:13] SPEAKER_00:

Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me on.

[23:18] SPEAKER_02:

I really appreciate it, Justin.

[23:19] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.