Kenton Brothers at ISC West – The largest security conference in the United States

ISC West is the largest security conference in the United States. This year, over 1,000 vendors showed up at the venue. The amount of information as you walk into the show floor is overwhelming. The number of people is staggering. Among all the booths there are standouts of emerging technology that is really exciting for our industry.

Today, I’d like to talk about a couple of things I saw at ISC West that are worth mentioning.

As an IT guy, I get really excited when something really geeky comes out. Sometimes it’s very cool, but not practical. This year though a cool and useful trend is emerging, Deep Neural Network (DNN) Learning. This is a technology that allows a computer system to make educated guesses about something and then learn from its mistakes.

Think of an infant learning to walk. They make lots of mistakes at first, but each try gets better and better until they no longer even think about it. Then they progress from walking to running and then jumping. DNN Learning is kind of the same process. We’re in the “learning to walk” phase, but it will only get better from here. Deep Neural Network Learning is the same technology that allowed Google to beat a human player in Go.

In the world of security, DNN can learn the difference between the background image and a person in the foreground. One such camera that we saw was Umbo. The Umbo camera can alert on just parts of a body; in the demo, just a human hand set off the camera analytics. We saw many applications of DNN from computers being able to tell whether a person was young or old, boy or girl, wearing glasses or riding a bike or a Drone being able to track a vehicle as it’s driving through traffic.

An entire section of the show was dedicated to unmanned technology.

There were several new technologies using drones, both on the ground and in the air. Some companies like Nightingale Security are using air based drones to do tours of a facility to identify threats. Robotic Assistance Devices is doing tours with ground-based drones. Then there’s a whole section of the drone sector dedicated to anti-drone technology. Drone Shield and Dedrone are two such companies that have unique ways of detecting drones. Disabling or jamming un-authorized drones seem like the next logical step after detection and there are some technologies out there already, but current laws don’t allow for easy application of the technology.

I’ve not been able to evaluate these companies yet, but I’m excited to see the new technology becoming available. It will be an interesting few years to see how much smarter our cameras and control systems are going to become. I believe that we witnessing the next major leap of camera technology!