Chicago/Boston, US, July 17 — Motorola Solutions announces a collaboration with AI company Neurala. They want to combine Motorola’s body-cams with Neurala’s machine learning technology to support public safety users, like police staff, with their tasks. One such feature would be rcognizing objects and attributes.
About the two companies
Motorola Solutions is the parent company that previously split off the Motorola Mobility division. Their focus is on innovative products for public safety and commercial customers. One such product is the Si500 body-camera that police officers could wear.
Neurala was founded in 2006 and it’s known for “The Neurala Brain”, a deep learning neural network software that can compute data from IoT-enabled products and can be controlled in a command center.
Finding people and objects with AI
When these two technology sets are combined, they could turn the body-worn endpoints into intelligent cameras. For instance, police officers getting a report on lost children could do patrols not only based on their human eyes but also switch on the body-camera and have the AI spot the kid. You can watch this scenario in the concept video below.
On the other hand, these features could also be used to spot wanted criminals that are still not caught. From a privacy protection point of view, these features should only be switched on when receiving a search order via radio. The cameras should not be permanently scanning people as the officers patrol the streets without being on the lookout for anyone in particular.
Similar technologies have also helped other safety organizations before. Read more:
- How Digitalization Enabled the Albuquerque Police Real-Time Crime Center
- Cyber Defense: Microsoft Introduces Digital Crimes Unit
Leadership insight
“We see powerful potential for artificial intelligence to improve safety and efficiency for our customers, which in turn helps create safer communities,” said Paul Steinberg, Chief Technology Officer, Motorola Solutions. “But applying AI in a public safety setting presents unique challenges. Neurala’s ‘edge learning’ capabilities will help us explore solutions for a variety of public safety workflows such as finding a missing child or investigating an object of interest, such as a bicycle.”
“Neurala’s L-DNN (Lifelong Deep Neural Network) technology eliminates the risk of ‘catastrophic forgetting,’ the number-one problem limiting the growth of deep learning neural networks for real-time use. Neurala’s technology solves the problem instantly at the device, accelerating the development of new AI applications that can learn at the edge after their deployment,” explained Massimiliano “Max” Versace, Neurala CEO. ”Working with Motorola Solutions to explore public safety applications of local, real-time AI leverages the power of artificial intelligence for the greater good.”
Update July 21st: A Motorola Solutions representative reached out and advised of some corrections for this article. They said that Telit Communications has not acquired them. Further research confirms that the original source of this information was wrong. Telit Communications has only acquired a certain business unit of Motorola Solutions in 2011 but that did not entail anything more.
Both Motorola Solutions and Neurala have reached out to make sure that their technology does not do facial recognition as previously reported. What they do is limited to recognizing objects and attributes (e. g. blue bike or a child with brown hair and a red shirt). The article has not been updated to reflect this better.
YouTube: AI-Powered Recognition Feature for IoT Police Body-Cams
Photo credit: Motorola Solutions
Source: Kate Dyer (Motorola Solutions), Alessandra Nagy (Neurala) / Crunchbase
Editorial notice: The quotes have been provided as part of a public press release.
