[Updated] Oosto Joins Panel to Address School Security at Carnegie Mellon Symposium

UPDATE 07/05/2022

On June 22, 2022, Carnegie Mellon University responded to the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, by hosting the School Safety Emergency Summit: a symposium on security technologies developed to prevent public violence. Among the panelists was Avi Golan, CEO of face biometrics security specialist Oosto.

“Oosto was founded on the belief that vision AI was all about preventing and alerting and dealing with these situations,” said Golan, during the moderated discussion. He went on to address the controversy surrounding surveillance technology. “There is kind of a fear of using advanced technologies. And I understand that. But I think that more education, more guidance, more communication, and sharing how these technologies can really help save lives, can go a long way in our journey to bring these technologies online .”

The full School Safety Emergency Summit is available to stream:

Learn more about the summit by reading our original announcement which follows:

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Carnegie Mellon University is hosting an online symposium that will address the threat of gun violence in American schools. The June 22 symposium is being organized in response to the tragic shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and will highlight technology and security solutions that could make schools safer for students and teachers alike.

To that end, Carnegie Mellon will convene a panel of experts from the security sector. One of those experts will be Oosto CEO Avi Golan, which is not surprising given the company’s prior partnership with Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab Biometric Research Center. Oosto is a computer vision and facial recognition specialist that has repeatedly argued that modern biometric security technology can help administrators identify threats more quickly.

In that regard, analytic software can be trained to track suspicious individuals and monitor certain kinds of activity across multiple video streams. According to Oosto, the technology can also be deployed in an ethical fashion, insofar as it can blur out the faces of anyone who is not of immediate interest to security personnel.

The other guests on the panel are Guy Grace, Michael Matranga, Bruce Montgomery, and Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid. Grace is the Director of Security for Littleton Public Schools and the Vice-Chairman of the Partner Alliance for Safer Schools (PASS), while Matranga is the CEO of the M6 Global security consultancy and Montgomery is a former law enforcement officer who now specializes in school security solutions for Honeywell. Yanisky-Ravid is a Yale Law School professor who has previously advocated for the creation of ethical facial recognition guidelines alongside Oooto in a symposium setting.

The online panel will be moderated by The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Chapman. Marios Savvides, a professor and the Director of Carnegie Mellon’s Biometrics Center, will also conduct a 20-minute lecture on the latest security technologies during the symposium.

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June 17, 2022 – by Eric Weiss