Michael Peveler, vice president of sales for AtlasIED, recently talked to SSI about how it’s keeping up with the evolution of mass communications and the advancements in artificial intelligence along with why it’s always looked to work with others in the security industry to solve customers’ problems.
Here are the highlights from that conversation:
What are some of the recent developments and trends in mass communications and what are you doing to address those?
Peveler: In the security world, the need to innovate comes from two different things, the first being legislation. A simple example of that is the adoption of Alyssa’s Law. In the education space, that started in Florida, moved to New Jersey and New York, then moved into other states, including Texas, where it’s a two-sentence law so there’s a lot of room for interpretation. We have to figure out how to help our clients, in this case, our education clients, to meet the standard.
The other force that comes in is the development of technology, and that forces evolution as well. Part of Alyssa’s Law that we try to work on meeting from a compliance standpoint is not just that you press a panic button and someone knows her panic button was pressed but we want to make sure that, when they press that panic button, that they know that it came from Room 207, not only in a front office, so the first responders know where that panic button was initiated.
How is artificial intelligence emerging as a factor in threat detection and what’s your company’s role in pushing that forward?
Peveler: I’m stealing again from a partner’s theme, but we detect, notify and then manage and we focus a lot on from our part of the pie—the notification piece—but, through partnerships and through compatibility, we’re getting a lot more into the detection piece, where you find AI living right now. It is such a core part of the detection. So, the old-school detection of, “Hey? A door’s open, so therefore someone’s trespassing,” which was just a simple contact closure is still there and there’s still a need for it, but we’re seeing evolution at just an incredible rate.
We can tie into stuff like loud noise detection, gunshot detection and vape detection. All that uses a certain element of AI, but even more exciting for us is that we partnered with a company called IntelliSee, an artificial intelligence camera solution. It allows us to detect something as small as a spill so we can identify a potential fall risk and we can go all the way up to someone pulling a weapon out of a car and putting it under their jacket to take into a building to do something horrific. And, if we see that with a camera in the parking lot, we could potentially, using the rest of what we do, lock that building down before they make it to the building.
We’ve always said our IPX system has a voice. Our first job is to make sure that everyone in the facility has that notification that there’s an issue, and they can then follow the proper procedure and the training with this AI partnership with IntelliSee. Our system now has eyes.
Logo courtesy of AtlasIED
Why are partnerships, interoperability and vetted ecosystems important to AtlasIED?
Peveler: First of all, any manufacturer that thinks they’re the isolated solution by themselves…it’s a pipe dream. In the security world, it’s so critical because what your customer wants to detect is different in every environment. When we’re in an industrial application or a healthcare application, the needs for detection would be common, but there will be very unique things to the environment they’re being put into. There’s no way we could possibly build a solution to have all those things, so having compatibility, being built on network standards for communication through standard protocols, having simple connection, like I/O contacts [is important].
Again, we build these really complicated API sometimes and then the installer runs a wire and it’s set up, but having that is critical to providing the end customer the solution, and in the world of security, the consequences are a lot bigger than a conference room or meeting not going off like it’s supposed to. There are potentially tragic results.
These partnerships allow us to expand the reach of what we do, which allows us to help our customers more, and then being able and being open to work with all these other manufacturers allows our solution to become much more robust, and again creates much safer environments for the end customer, which is where we’re really focused.
