A team of 12 University of Maryland students won $250,000 Thursday after placing first in a competition to design artificial intelligence software that automatically reports school shootings to authorities.
Education college dean Kimberly Griffin announced the winner during a summit at Amazon’s second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, after the conclusion of an 18-month competition focused on school safety.
The winning team, DefenX, beat fellow University of Maryland finalist Weapon Watch in the competition hosted by xFoundry, a startup incubator founded by this university in 2023. As members of DefenX took the stage, they were visibly emotional.
“We all have been a part of the American education system … and we don’t want any student, staff member or teacher feeling the fears that we felt,” said DefenX team member Srinidhi Gubba, a junior computer science and individual studies double major.
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Gubba said she knows the anxiety that the threat of gun violence in schools can cause. If the team’s work helps even one person, they’d be happy with the results, she said.
During the competition, teams were judged on criteria such as the speed, accuracy and cost-effectiveness of their AI detection software, according to Phillip Alvarez, head of products and ventures at xFoundry.
“Most market leaders in the school safety space are adapted from stadiums and from airports,” Alvarez said. “They’re pretty good quality-wise, but very expensive.”
Using DefenX’s software, schools can use their existing security cameras to detect potential threats, according to Nithin Skantha, an applied machine learning graduate student.
Once set up, the program uses image recognition to identify when someone is holding a weapon, Skantha said.
After the technology detects a weapon, it tracks the person carrying the weapon throughout the school, Skantha said.
“Even if [a shooter] goes in the frame of different cameras, they go into blind spots, we track them as soon as they appear back in a different camera,” Skantha said. “That’s the specialty that we have.”
The event comes after multiple shootings at school campuses this week.
A shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado left the teenage shooter dead and two other students critically injured. That same day, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot during a campus event at Utah Valley University.
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Through the team’s work, DefenX hopes to quicken emergency responses to similar incidents.
DefenX plans to use the $250,000 award to scale its technology by getting stronger processors and starting real-world testing, according to Smithi Mahendran, a junior computer science major.
“We’re going to prioritize trying to get our name across the school industry, trying to deploy our product or even do some pilot tests,” she said.
In the future, team members hope to expand their software so it can be used for multiple applications.
Ian Njenga, who graduated in 2025 after studying accounting and finance, said though the project is currently focused on gun violence, that’s not the only type of incident the technology could be used for.
“Students fight, students fall, students get sick,” Njenga said. “And so we’re thinking about training multiple models that can work for all these kinds of scenarios, and help us become a much better multimodal solution for schools.”
