AI security system coming to Loudoun County schools after success in Maryland

CROWNSVILLE, Md. (7News) — Ben Gehle was relaxing at home in his living room after work in late March when the alert first came across his phone.

“We had a student having a medical emergency and was on the floor, and I got that notification sitting on my couch at home,” Gehle recalled in a recent interview with 7News.

Gehle is in his tenth year as the Chief Technology and Operations Officer for Indian Creek School, a private school in Crownsville, Maryland. The alert he received in late March wouldn’t have been sent to his phone at all had it not been for artificial intelligence-driven software installed last December as part of the school’s security system.

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“Within a couple of minutes, we were able to deploy a resource in the school to go check on the student, call 9-1-1. Ultimately, the student was fine, but had we not known about that, and it was at an hour that we don’t have a lot of people around, that could have ended much worse,” Gehle said.

Indian Creek school officials withheld the identity of the student involved in the medical incident out of concerns for his privacy.

Indian Creek installed the new security software as part of a contract with Bethesda, Maryland-based Volt AI, a tech startup that has worked for years in the corporate world but in recent months has expanded into the educational sector.

Now in twelve different states, Volt AI recently signed a five-year deal with Loudoun County Public Schools worth $1.1 million the first year, according to a Loudoun County schools spokesperson. Installation of the software in Loudoun County’s 98 schools begins this fall.

In a statement, John Clark, LCPS’ Director of Safety and Security, called the new technology “a practical and non-intrusive layer of security.”

Gehle has already seen the results of how AI-driven security works in real time.

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The heart of the technology is its ability to train a virtual set of eyes on the 94 security cameras that cover the common areas of Indian Creek’s campus. The school does not have cameras in its locker rooms, bathrooms, or classrooms, Gehle said.

“Most schools, many companies, don’t have the resources to have somebody looking at a camera every day, so having AI do that detection for you is like having a million eyes that you wouldn’t ever normally have,” Gehle said.

Volt AI CEO and co-founder Dmitry Sokolowski told 7News the company’s proprietary software does more than monitor existing security cameras. He said it creates an understanding of what the physical world should look like and then flags anomalies, like a weapon in a school hallway, smoke from a fire, a person falling to the ground because of an accident or medical emergency.

The software can also provide police and security personnel with the ability to track a suspect in an active shooter incident, even if the shooter drops the weapon and moves throughout the school.

“AI is a tool. It’s just like any other tool. It helps people be more effective,” Sokolowski said. “We started making those cameras be a tool that allows them to be at the right place at the right time and respond to the right thing.”

At Volt AI’s Bethesda headquarters, a team of human validators constantly reviews incidents flagged by the AI model before deciding whether to alert clients. Many of the clients, like those in the education sector, have authorized the company to immediately contact 9-1-1 when a weapon is detected on site.

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Sokolowski, 38, and co-founder, 39-year-old co-founder Egor Olteanu are both from the former Soviet republic of Moldova but became friends after meeting as teenagers in Maryland. The idea for their company was born on a day neither of them will forget.

On April 3, 2018, Olteanu, who was working for Google at the time, agreed to go to lunch with Sokolowski at the cafeteria inside YouTube’s San Bruno, California, headquarters. Olteanu recalls that they were running late that day.

The two men arrived at YouTube only to discover a woman with a 9mm handgun had been there minutes before, shooting and injuring three employees in the cafeteria before turning the gun on herself and taking her own life.

Police later discovered that the shooter, 38-year-old Nasim Najafi Aghdam, was a disgruntled YouTube account holder who had displayed her handgun in the parking garage minutes before entering the building, a detail not lost on Sokolowski and Olteanu.

“And that’s sort of what made the imprint, we were this close to being there and being part of something horrible,” Sokolowski said, holding his thumb and forefinger next to one another to drive home the point.

Sokolowski and Olteanu formed Volt AI later that same year, raising their first round of venture capital investment in 2020.

Without identifying the specific client, Sokolowski told 7News Volt AI’s software has helped identify a switchblade a student made with a 3D printer, and a machete a man brought on site at one of the company’s corporate clients.

“Luckily, we’ve never had an active shooter event unfold at a school,” Sokolowski said.

Eliminating false positives is one of the objectives. Sokolowski remembers the duck-and-cover drills he once practiced as a young student in his native Moldova. A father of three children, all under the age of ten, he said, “The last thing we want is to send the school into a lockdown when nothing happened.”

“I’m a father of three, and my kids are terrified when they come home after or before the ‘active drills’ as they’re called these days. And, to me, that’s almost unacceptable in our state, and I wanted to help do something about it,” Sokolowski said.

At Indian Creek School, Volt AI’s software identified a weapon on campus that turned out to be a security guard exposing his sidearm when he lifted his shirt during a shift change, Gehle said. The incident happened outside of school hours and was quickly identified as a false alarm.

But the algorithm within the AI model, Gehle said, is also capable of examining student behavior.

“It can detect bullying. We have had that happen here. There was one student sort of surrounded by a small group of other students, and it picked up on that immediately,” he added.

When asked how the company protects privacy, Sokolowski told 7News, “We’re not doing anything that the schools haven’t been doing already.”

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Meaning Volt AI uses the existing security cameras within a school to be the eyes of its AI software.

Gehle said access to the Volt AI data provided to Indian Creek is limited to a small collection of staffers on the security and operations team.

“It’s not ‘Big Brother’ ish,” Gehle said, adding, “There’s so much concern today about the harm that AI does or that people can cheat with it. This is really good use of technology to help protect people, specifically the kids that go to our schools.”