I-Corps: Privacy-Responsive Artificial Intelligence-Based Solution for Smart Video Surveillance

Award ID: 2323757

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is exploring societal needs, market prospects, and obstacles in harnessing the latest artificial intelligence breakthroughs to tackle public safety challenges. This project uncovers and adopts optimal practices to maximize the advantages of intelligent video surveillance technologies while addressing the associated privacy and ethical considerations. This project seeks to create a responsible and privacy-responsive artificial intelligence that various stakeholders, business owners, local communities, and the public can accept, adopt, and use. By using advanced technologies ethically and responsibly, this project aims to create a buffer between authorities and civilians, minimizing unnecessary conflicts and eliminating biases based on race, ethnicity, gender, age, and socioeconomic status. This I-Corps project is based on developing artificial intelligence-based computer vision and video analytic technologies to perform complex cognitive tasks to identify potentially threatening anomalous behaviors in community spaces. Furthermore, it will equip end-users to view meta-analyses based on temporal events and statistics by providing a mobile application and a web portal to notify the residents, commuters, and responsible security personnel. The entire intelligent processing will perform next to the cameras without saving or sending the actual videos to an external server. For anomaly detection, the proposed technology will not use personally identifiable information or facial recognition and only relies on behaviors and activities within community spaces. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Program Director: Molly Wasko