An innovative firearm detection system using artificial intelligence (AI) was developed by the entrepreneur from Chillán Eduardo Arriagada Díaz, a management control engineer who has been working in technological development for 15 years and in recent years has specialized in AI and facial recognition.
To scale up and commercialize this technology, he founded the company Wawat this year, together with his business partner Fernando Stange, from Santiago. He stressed that there are promising projections for the use of this technology in Chile, to combat the increase in crime.
Through images captured by surveillance cameras, the professional explained that “with this I warn you before the crime occurs, that is, if the person takes out a weapon before entering an establishment or a company and I detect it, it allows you to give yourself valuable seconds to take action and not find that the person is already inside committing the crime.”
Arriagada recalled that, “I had this project in my back pocket for regarding five years. I realized, following the shootings in the United States, that gun regulations were not being applied properly, and I thought it would be a good concept to implement here, but to build it in Chile.”
“Until last year -he continued-, I took it up once more precisely in a context of increased violence in the country, and I started the second semester programming this. I already had a weapons database, which I had already worked on. With my partner, who is part of the La Reina shooting club, we trained the system together and we began to have the first demos and we realized that it worked. We put together the code in Chile, we created a database of almost 7 thousand images of weapons, running this process, investing in servers so that it works with machine learning, which is the technology that makes it possible for AI to be applied, it is teaching the machine to recognize what is there.”
He explained that this technology was born several years ago in the Pentagon in the United States, focused on military weapons, and then the model was replicated for use in schools to prevent shootings.
Value proposal
The entrepreneur explained that this innovation gives a use to that data. “That is the value proposition that we offer, because although we collect the information, we process it, we run it on a server, but it is how I return it to you where the magic is; and that is the beauty of usability, because I give you a dashboard with different alerts, with notifications, this allows you to have the information in real time, at your fingertips, so that you can take action on what you want to do, because the reality is that there is not always a person who can go and address this illicit act, we know of the lack of personnel in all institutions, but if I raise this alert, you can assign personnel to go and confront this illicit act or at least, have the data and evidence to use in an investigation.”
He indicated that potential buyers of this software are “public institutions that need this as a tool to combat crime, such as municipalities, and private institutions that want to provide security to their clients and staff, such as banks, supermarkets, malls, storage companies, among others.
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