TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas could soon offer up to $5 million in grants for schools to outfit surveillance cameras with artificial intelligence systems that can spot people carrying guns. But the governor needs to approve the expenditures and the schools must meet some very specific criteria.
“We’re not paying legislators to write us into their bills," ZeroEyes co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer Sam Alaimo said. But "if they’re doing that, it means I think they’re doing their homework, and they’re making sure they’re getting a vetted technology.”ZeroEyes uses artificial intelligence with surveillance cameras to identify visible guns, then flashes an alert to an operations center staffed around the clock by former law enforcement officers and military veterans.
“The artificial-intelligence-driven weapons detection is absolutely wonderful," Stoddard said. "But it’s probably not the priority that 95% of the schools in the United States need right now.” Though Omnilert is in hundreds of schools, its products aren't in 30 states, said Mark Franken, Omnilert's vice president of marketing. But he said that shouldn't disqualify his company from state grants.
In Kansas, ZeroEyes' chief strategy officer presented an overview of its technology in February to the House K-12 Education Budget Committee. It included a live demonstration of its AI gun detection and numerous actual surveillance photos spotting guns at schools, parking lots and transit stations. The presentation also noted authorities arrested about a dozen people last year directly as a result of ZeroEyes alerts.
Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersFormer President Donald Trump put himself on shuffle and played the hits Saturday night at his rally in Wildwood, New Jersey.The MAGA shindig along the beach drew a crowd estimated to be between 80,000 and 100,000 people, according to a spokesperson for the city. But if they were hoping to hear any new ideas from the former president, they were out of luck.
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh told an Austin judicial conference on Friday that his experience in the George W. Bush administration has made him more skeptical of presidential assertions of regulatory power.