As the chief information officer for the City of Opelika, Dawe is responsible for all technology in every department in the city — from the building inspector taking photographs during an inspection to police officers merely driving around the city.
One area he has overseen is the implementation of inferencing artificial intelligence models and programs in security cameras at public places in Opelika to help improve monitoring of those spaces.
"We're not trying to build a surveillance state here. We're trying to build something that could recognize behaviors in crowds, keep people safe and keep the city out of trouble," Dawe said. "That's really all we're trying to do."
WHAT SPARKED THE USE OF AI FOR SECURITY
Dawe has been with the City of Opelika since 2013, and he was working with the city when 7-year-old Liam Kawaguchi, of Opelika, was found unresponsive at a day camp at the Covington Recreation Center pool on June 21, 2018. Kawaguchi was pronounced dead on June 28, 2018, from an "anoxic brain injury."Dawe said at the time the pool at Covington Rec did not have security cameras, so those were added. Then shortly after, under Dawe's direction, the city implemented AI inference software in the cameras. Effectively, they trained the system where it can detect people in the pool, for example, after hours, and alert city personnel.
Dawe said the focus has been two-fold, on protecting residents of Opelika and protecting the city itself from liability if something were to happen.
"All we're trying to do is build a system that can protect the city from liability," Dawe said. "But also, now that we have it's like, 'Okay, what else can we use this for? How can we help? How can we provide services to the citizens now? What other services can we provide?'"
After the system was implemented successfully, Dawe said he received a call from City Administrator Joey Motley about people putting bubbles in the fountain at Courthouse Square. The problem has been going on for more than a decade, and Dawe said when pranksters would pour soap into the fountain, it would damage the fountain's expensive pump and cost thousands of dollars. Dawe had the program for people detection so they could have an alert system if people were in the fountain, but he needed one that could also detect bubbles developing.
This required starting from scratch and training a model to detect bubbles in the fountain and alert city personnel. There was even a hiccup of sorts when someone put soap in the fountain around St. Patrick's Day, and the water and bubbles were green, so the AI model did not recognize it. If the model registers an 80+% positive identification of bubbles, a person with the city is notified and reviews the footage before law enforcement is alerted
"If they come and put bubbles in there, basically what will happen is we'll shut the fountain off, and we'll call the police," Dawe said. "If the fountain goes off, I'm sure the kids will run away, but everything will be on film anyway, so we can just go back and pull the footage from there."
He stressed that a human is always in the loop, and the AI model does not directly alert police to come to the area. When asked if the system could be automated where police are alerted directly, he deferred to the chief of the Opelika Police Department.
"Speaking as an IT guy, I would love to see something like that. To be honest, though, I don't really think there's enough trust in the system at this point, and I wouldn't blame anybody. I absolutely think there should be a human in the loop with any tactical response for anything," Dawe said.
HOW EXACTLY DOES IT WORK?
The City of Opelika uses Cisco Meraki cameras around the city which have enough "CPU horsepower" that AI models can be loaded onto the cameras themselves for specific functions like weather detection, people counting or bubble-detection models. Dawe said all of the inferencing happens in the cameras and is not directly sent back to a data collect center. Dawe said the city trains AI models in the cloud from the company Cogniac, and once the models are trained to detect whatever the city is looking for with the particular cameras, then the models are loaded onto the cameras.
So for example, Dawe was at a conference when he met Cogniac, and he was looking for an AI model for bubbles detection. Cogniac did not have one, but Dawe said they gave him an empty one to train.
The City of Opelika does not have a physical data center yet, though there are plans for putting one in the AUBix data center in Auburn. So for now, all of the data from events detected, such as when there are confirmed bubbles in the fountain or people in the pool, goes to Vantiq, which operates in the Amazon cloud. Vantiq is "the leading platform for creating and operating real-time intelligent systems," according to the company's website.
"For years, we've been looking for a real-time system where we can bring everything together, all our data, in one place, and then actually look at those events and say, 'What are we interested in? What do we not care about?' And then what are we going to do with that when we've decided we are interested in something.' Vantiq helps us do that," Dawe said. "I spent the best part of five years looking for a product that would do that."
According to a study from Vantiq, the use of the system and programs in the case of the Courthouse Square fountain "resulted in an 83% reduction in the frequency of these pranks, along with yearly savings of at least $75,000."
‘THIS IS NOT 1984’
Throughout the interview with the Opelika-Auburn News, Dawe stressed the idea that this is not about being able to track people as much as it is about safety and protecting the citizens of Opelika, as well as the city itself.
He said the data capturing on things like bubbles in the fountain is to protect the city from having to spend thousands to replace the fountain pump, and a model that counts the number of people in downtown in an event is more for economic development purposes. He said the emphasis is on "counting people, not recognizing people."
"Anything that we're doing has to be fully auditable, and we have to be able to explain, 'This is why these decisions were made. This is what we're using this data for,'" Dawe said. "...Going back to what I said at the beginning, we're not trying to build Big Brother. This is not '1984,' and I want to avoid that at all costs."
Additionally, Dawe said AI will not replace Opelika employees but will allow the city to be more productive and efficient with its time.
"We're trying to make people more productive. At the end of the day, Opelika runs on a fairly small footprint as far as people goes. And the more productive we can make people, the more we can keep that true. And the more we can...make their jobs easier, make them faster."
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
The inferencing AI in the cameras goes beyond just telling administrators if there are bubbles in the fountain or people in the Covington pool after hours. Dawe said they have trained the model to do weather detection, and they already have it in cameras at the Opelika Sportsplex.
"We have one weather monitoring station over the Sportsplex at this moment in time. It actually started out as lightning detection, because it's an outdoor pool," Dawe said. "If we detect a storm force within eight miles, then it alerts the lifeguards, and they clear the pool."
Dawe said the model at the Sportsplex is a success, and the city plans to install the same system at the Covington Recreation Center pool, Floral Park and West Ridge Ballpark. That will make four systems around the city and will give them a chance to get weather data overall.
"Capturing in just one location in a 62 square-mile city is not indicative of the entire city," Dawe said. "All that data will come in, and it'll get monitored in real time, and then we'll build applications around it."
Those applications include the chance to run simulations on developments for the city. He said he is working on cameras for pollution and traffic, which gives them a better feel for how much traffic is on what roads at which times. The end goal he said is to build a "digital twin," a digital version of the City of Opelika that Dawe and city employees can run simulations with. Those simulations can include, for example, how a subdivision on a certain road affects the surrounding area and the city as a whole.
"What effect does all that have," Dawe said. "How many business parks does it allow the city to open up? And where are the jobs coming from? And what kind of businesses does economic development want? They're the questions that I'm not going to answer. I'm just the IT guy, but we can simulate it and help the people who do that answer those questions."
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