Artificial Intelligence Helps Keep Borders Safe

Artificial Intelligence Helps Keep Borders Safe

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Recent debate over the of use of technologies in border patrol – following President Trump’s intention to build a wall along the Mexican border – raises the question of the best possible way for keeping a border safe.
The suite of technologies usually deployed for this purpose include drones, powerful cameras, various detection devices and sensors, mobile communications, satellite imagery, biometrics, big-data analytics, and artificial intelligence. The information produced by these and other types of technologies allow border security officials and personnel to knit data together in order to provide heightened situational awareness of border activities that facilitates both tactical action and strategic adjustment. Better situational awareness provides border security with the flexibility to tailor deployment of personnel, technology, and physical barriers in accordance with key factors, including topography, climate, demographics, and patterns of migration and criminal activities, according to cfr.org.
Comprehensive border security and immigration reform legislation passed by the Senate in 2013 based its provisions on the strategic and tactical importance of integrating border security personnel, technologies, and physical barriers, calling for an increase in the number of border patrol agents, deployment of “additional mobile, video, and agent-portable surveillance systems, and unmanned aerial vehicles to provide 24-hour operation and surveillance.”, according to cnbc.com.
With this as a challenge, a new technology is using artificial intelligence to create a high-tech surveillance system that could be used to build a “virtual wall” on the southern US border.
The system “is an AI-powered sensor fusion platform that can take data from thousands of sensors and integrate it into a single cohesive, real-time 3-D model that has everything in it tagged using machine learning — so, all the people, all the vehicles, all the drones and the aircrafts over very large areas.”
This system uses a network of connected cameras and infrared sensors that can be set up along wide swaths of land (attached to towers, or even to small flying drones), potentially covering hundreds of miles of the US border. The system’s AI-powered technology can scan for movement miles away while analyzing the source to see if it has spotted a person, a vehicle, an animal, etc.
The platform could make it easier for US border agents to monitor for unauthorized border crossings. Rather than agents scanning surveillance systems themselves, poring over footage from hundreds of miles of land looking for people and vehicles trying to cross the border without authorization, border agents would instead receive alerts from the system any time its AI-powered technology identifies a potential unauthorized crossing in progress.