These AI Techniques Have Reportedly Minimized The Number Of School Shootings

On the same day of last year, one of the horrible school shootings happened in Parkland, Florida, US. In this case, up to 17 victims were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

The high school shooting happened in Parkland, Florida in 2018.

Considering the US history, it may be the scariest case. After that, many different tech firms have made efforts to develop artificial intelligence (AI) products to put an end to similar situations in the future. More impressively, these systems are reportedly marking some of the violent incidents with a flag before they come true.

USA Today has revealed that some of the tech firms have offered services with built-in AI as a solution to minimize the number of school shootings.

For example, Bark Technologies created an AI to monitor the following data of students, from emails, accounts on the social media sites, as well as text messages to look for signs of cyber harassment, depression, drug use, and the like. It will automatically send alerts to the concerned officials in over 1,100 school districts when realizing something dangerous.

The same circumstance also happens to Securly and Gaggle. Both of these companies are working in the fashion section and combining human experts in safety with AI. Securly keeps track of social media accounts and searches on the Internet from about 2,000 school districts, while Gaggle controls all emails the students from approximately 1,400 districts receive.

Pursuant to the contract with the schools, these companies have no rights to monitor online accounts and personal devices of students via the above services. More exactly, they only control devices issued by the schools themselves and online accounts which are generated according to the schools’ email addresses. In addition, if parents want to keep an eye on the accounts and personal devices of their children, they can pay to use these services.

Titania Jordan, as the chief parent officer of Bark Technologies, said to the USA Today that up to 16 reasonable school shootings have been reported to the FBI by his company from February 2018 to now.

Also in 2018, Gaggle has detected 240 cases; of which, students brought weapons to their schools to kill themselves or other students.

Surveillance technologies have always gone with privacy issues, one of the top cared issues nowadays. However, before the sharply increasing number of school shootings of 2018, the US has allegedly believed that such technologies should be applied more widely if they prove its efficiency.