But the academic calendar marches on.

So on Monday, Duke Kunshan will resume classes as an online university until further notice. Out, for now, are face-to-face seminars. In are virtual classrooms, laboratories and forums that hundreds of students will access through computers wherever they happen to be.

It is one of many improvised educational responses to a public health emergency that has disrupted daily routines for millions since the novel coronavirus epidemic surged last month in China and began spreading to other countries. The virus can cause respiratory illness and in some cases death.

This wasn’t what Duke University imagined when it launched Duke Kunshan in 2013, just west of Shanghai, in partnership with Wuhan University of China. But Matthew Rascoff, Duke’s associate vice provost for digital education and innovation, said the Kunshan venture has no other options.

“When the alternative is no learning at all,” he said, “and the institution grinds to a halt, then online is looking a lot better.” Rascoff said Duke is sparing no expense to aid what is, effectively, “a university in exile.”

An online school also wasn’t what Alberto Najarro envisioned when he turned down offers from prestigious universities in the United States in 2018 to join Duke Kunshan’s first undergraduate class. Leaving classmates with a hasty goodbye in late January, Najarro flew home to El Salvador and has kept in touch with friends through text messages and video calls. He is eager to return to studies in Chinese, microeconomics and environmental science.

“I look forward to seeing how online classes will work for us,” the 20-year-old sophomore wrote in an email. He expects the digital setup will follow the university’s emphasis on active learning with a liberal-arts approach. “I have my concerns, of course. But I’m rest[ing] assured that we will make it through.”

Kiera Zhou, 19, also a sophomore, from Yangzhou, China, said she worries the online courses might not be as lively as those taught in person. “I really like in-class discussions, when we communicate and argue with others,” she wrote in an email. “That is a unique experience.”

The viral outbreak, which struck heavily in Wuhan and the Hubei province, scrambled education timetables throughout China. The usual school break for the Lunar New Year was extended as authorities sought to slow the spread of the virus.

For universities, especially those with students far from campus, online education can provide a temporary fix in the urgent quest to restore academic order. The prominent Tsinghua University in Beijing started its spring semester online Feb. 3. “Delaying a return to school doesn’t mean no classes – we can continue our education,” university President Qiu Yong told students who listened via laptops and smartphones.

New York University launched an online program Feb. 17 for its Shanghai campus. The program offers 293 courses for 820 undergraduates and 136 graduate students. They are “signing in from all over the world,” Jeffrey Lehman, NYU Shanghai’s vice chancellor, wrote in an email, “and we have experienced very few glitches so far.” Hundreds of other NYU students ordinarily based in Shanghai are studying abroad this semester in New York and other NYU locations.

Lehman is co-teaching a class called “Creativity Considered,” using online communication tools Zoom and Slack. “It was a tremendous relief to discover that we could maintain authentic discussion and engagement,” he wrote. NYU awarded its first bachelor’s degrees in Shanghai in 2017 and is expanding its campus there.

For Duke Kunshan, the crisis hit at a delicate moment: The university is in the midst of recruiting its third undergraduate class.

The school has about 325 freshmen and 250 sophomores, as well as 125 graduate students. Two-thirds of the undergraduates are from China, with the rest from the United States and elsewhere. Tuition for international undergrads is about $55,000 for the current school year, not counting room and board. For Chinese students, it is about $25,000.

About 50 undergrads have remained in Kunshan with a small group of staff. The campus has had no reported cases of coronavirus infections, officials said.

Duke Kunshan’s executive vice chancellor, Denis Simon, said the university cannot skimp on academic quality, no matter the medium of instruction, because its brand is at stake. The first undergrads are planning to study for a semester at Duke next school year and then return to China. They expect to earn two bachelor’s degrees in 2022 – one from Duke and one from Duke Kunshan.

“We really have to deliver a first-class education, through and through,” Simon said in a telephone interview Feb. 19 as he was traveling to the Duke campus in Durham, North Carolina.

There, several Duke Kunshan professors have been huddling in recent days with Duke experts to map an online curriculum for the final four weeks of a seven-week term. The school year is supposed to conclude with one more seven-week term in the spring. If needed, that will be online, too.

The highly ranked U.S. university has years of experience with online education in business, nursing and other fields. Duke also has posted dozens of classes on the Web platform Coursera in subjects including dog psychology and machine learning. The proliferation of online courses in recent years has spurred teaching innovations throughout higher education. It is common for lectures to be posted and searchable online, for digital discussion groups to be woven into face-to-face classes and for students to take a mix of courses online and in person.

But converting an entire liberal-arts school to a remote digital format within a few weeks poses an unusual test.

James Miller, a professor of humanities at Duke Kunshan, is part of a team teaching 160 freshmen a core class called “China in the World.” Ordinarily, class meets four times a week for lectures and small-group discussions.

Miller expects something like that schedule will continue online even though his students are tuning in from multiple continents and time zones. Those unable to participate in real time will be able to watch or listen afterward to catch up. “We’re cognizant that not every student in China, or wherever in the world, may have the bandwidth or Internet connectivity to participate 100% in a video conference meeting,” Miller said in a telephone interview from Durham.

In his career, Miller has always taught face-to-face. “For me, this has definitely been a new challenge,” he said. “And also an opportunity. In effect, being forced to use all the new technology has forced us to innovate in our teaching. Now, I’m thinking some of the technologies we’ve been learning, maybe we will keep.”

Benjamin Bacon, an associate professor of media and arts at Duke Kunshan, said he expects to hold plenty of video sessions for his classes in design perspectives and audio documentary. He said he has kept in touch with his students. “Everybody is healthy,” he said from Durham. “Nobody even has a sore throat.”

Students seem to be taking the upheaval in stride.

Nancy Zhu, 19, a freshman, wrote in an email from her home in Luoyang, China, that she is not worried. With video conferencing, Zhu wrote, she can easily talk with friends about schoolwork. “I think there is no difference in what we learn, it is just learning in a different way,” she said. “So, I feel quite connected.”

Spencer Reeves, 20, a sophomore, said going online is the only practical solution. “It also will help us to prepare for a working world where many meetings are conducted over the Internet,” he wrote in an email from his home in Connecticut. “These situations just make us better people overall.”

Wanying He, 18, a sophomore, from Hunan province in China, chose to stay on campus with a small group of others. She’s plowing ahead in logic and computer science courses, and plays guitar at night with friends to pass the time.

“Most people are still keeping up with their work and study as best as they can,” He wrote in an email. “We encourage each other, and none of us actually think the situation is that bad. . . . Seriously, nothing to complain about. Gorgeous campus, great facilities, and . . . a library open 24/7!”

A sensor system to monitor the development of patients in critical condition using big data is 10 to 100 times faster than a traditional system in indexing and searching for data. The system is used in screening patients in critical condition as well as suspected cases.

Data from the nation’s three telecommunication providers and the Baidu map application provides the number of people who migrated from the virus epicenter of Hubei province and where they traveled, to help guide control measures in different regions.

Full 5G coverage in the two makeshift hospitals of Huoshenshan and Leishenshan has ensured smooth and reliable communications and will also play a critical role in intelligent medical treatment.

Under the 5G network in the ward, robots and cloud medical consultation systems can help avoid unnecessary contact between medics and patients to reduce cross infection.

In public disease control, a no-contact infrared sensor system to identify passersby with a fever or without masks has been widely used in airports, subways and highways. Remote medical consultation can help other patients who are not advised to go to the hospital. AI doctors have been introduced in hospitals and residential communities to help screen suspected cases and diagnose symptoms.

People don’t have to fill in personal information over and over if they present a green health QR code when commuting in public. People in more than 100 cities will get their own codes that they had previously applied for online after scanning the verification codes through Alipay.

While it’s probably too late for the fledgling technology to play a major role in the current epidemic, there’s hope for the next outbreaks. AI is good at combing through mounds of data to find connections that make it easier to determine what kinds of treatments could work or which experiments to pursue next.

The question is what Big Data will come up with when it only gets meager scraps of information on a newly emerged illness like Covid-19, which first emerged late last year in China and has sickened more than 75,000 people in about two months.

The fact that researchers managed to produce the gene sequencing of the new virus within weeks of the first reported cases is promising, since it shows there’s far more immediate data available now when outbreaks happen.

Andrew Hopkins, chief executive officer of Oxford, England-based startup Exscientia Ltd. is among those working to help train artificial intelligence for drug discovery. He figures new treatments could go from conception to clinical testing in as little as 18 to 24 months within the next decade, thanks to AI.

Exscientia designed a new compound for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder that’s ready to be tested in the lab after less than a year in the initial research phase. That’s about five times faster than average, according to the company.

Cambridge-based Healx has a similar approach, but it uses machine learning to find new uses for existing drugs. Both companies feed their algorithms with information — gleaned from sources such as journals, biomedical databases and clinical trials — to help suggest new treatments for diseases.

The two companies each use a team of human researchers to work alongside the AI to help guide the process. In Exscientia’s approach, dubbed the Centaur Chemist, drug designers help teach the algorithms strategies for searching for compounds. Healx puts the AI’s predictions to researchers who analyze the results and decide what to pursue.

Neil Thompson, Healx’s chief science officer, said the technique could be deployed against an outbreak like the coronavirus as long as it had enough data on the new disease. Healx isn’t working on tackling the coronavirus or tweaking its technology for outbreaks, but it wouldn’t be a stretch.

“We’re quite close,” Thompson said in an interview. “We wouldn’t need to change much about the AI algorithms we use. We look at matching drug properties to disease features.”

Artificial intelligence algorithms are already starting to churn out drugs for the diseases we know about. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said on Thursday that they’d used the method to identify a powerful new antibiotic compound that could kill an array of troublesome bacteria, even some that are currently resistant to other treatments.

One catch for all these technologies is clinical testing. Even drugs already safe for use to cure one ailment should be tested again before they’re prescribed for another. The process of showing they are safe and effective on a large number of people can take years before going to regulators for review.

To be effective, AI-based drug developers would have to plan ahead of time, picking out a virus genome likely to cause problems in the future and targeting it when there are few incentives to do so.

Another obstacle is finding qualified staff.

“It’s hard to find people who can operate at the intersection of AI and biology, and it’s difficult for big companies to make quick decisions on technology like this,” said Irina Haivas, a partner at venture capital firm Atomico and former surgeon who sits on the board of Healx. “It’s not enough to be an AI engineer, you have to understand and get into the applications of biology.”

Putting “C” students into AP felt on those campuses like a cultural gaffe, the equivalent of holding the senior prom in March.

The situation has improved somewhat. About 12 percent of high schools have at least half of their 11th- and 12th-graders taking a least one AP or IB course. Still, the majority of average students are told to stick with easy stuff. I figured that must be because school leaders weren’t taking into account the needs of students to be ready for college or a job.

Craig Kesselheim is changing my mind about this. He is a senior associate at the Great Schools Partnership, a nonprofit school-support organization based in Portland, Maine. He said the tendency to sort rather than teach is rooted in a specific high school administrative routine – producing the Program of Study, otherwise known as the course catalogue. It describes every subject at every level available at the school.

“Logistically, Program of Study documents are most often published midyear or early spring to assist school counselors with the course placement of entering ninth-graders,” Kesselheim said. “A frequent result of this deadline pressure is a hastily cobbled-together collection of paragraphs, submitted by teachers and department heads, comprised largely of last year’s text, and edited by no one.”

Middle school teachers are pressed into recommending which students going into high school should take honors courses and which should not. In many schools, “there is no science to these acts of judgment and no uniformity across teachers or across content areas,” Kesselheim said. “Placement recommendations are highly subject to departmental whims, teachers’ beliefs about ability and implicit bias.”

Kesselheim was once a middle school science teacher and administrator. For the past 16 years, he has been helping schools and districts ease themselves out of traditional course hierarchies that don’t make sense. “Highly engaged parents use the system to ensure their students rise to the top. America’s DNA for public education seems to be a zero sum game: In order to have winners, we must have losers,” he said.

I asked why so many schools, usually run by intelligent people who want the best for their students, let this go on. He blamed professional isolation, something I have seen often in the schools but never thought about much. Teachers must make their own decisions on a variety of matters, including grading. The same isolation is imposed on department heads, counselors and administrators.

Schools might have mission statements promising common goals, but hardly anyone pays attention. “One department, maybe social studies, provides an open door to any student wishing to embrace the challenge embedded in an honors-level class,” Kesselheim said. “The department down the hall or in another wing, perhaps English, requires an application essay.”

Unguided grading practices pave the way for mindless sorting. “School systems do a far better job of codifying dress codes, class-rank procedures and disciplinary ladders than they do in guiding and unifying teachers’ grading practices,” he said. Grades influence how students think about themselves and their futures, yet teachers often give grades as they like without much thought about the effect. There is little evidence that bad grades inspire improvement, while instruction that is challenging has been shown to work.

It usually takes an order from above to change practices at high schools that keep average students out of AP and IB classes. The Fairfax County School Board’s decision to open AP and IB classes to all students in 1998 brought much change and spread through the rest of Northern Virginia. Sadly, few other states and districts have made that move.

Kesselheim said he thinks schools can fix this on their own. They can launch course reviews, seek community engagement and get isolated teachers and counselors to talk to one another.

Average students often have much potential, but how can they show it if they are always assigned to the slowest and dullest courses?

The technology giant is discussing whether to let users choose third-party web browser and mail applications as their default options on Apple’s mobile devices, replacing the company’s Safari browser and Mail app, according to people familiar with the matter. Since launching the App Store in 2008, Apple hasn’t allowed users to replace pre-installed apps such as these with third-party services. That has made it difficult for some developers to compete, and has raised concerns from lawmakers probing potential antitrust violations in the technology industry.

The web browser and mail are two of the most-used apps on the iPhone and iPad. To date, rival browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox and mail apps like Gmail and Microsoft Outlook have lacked the status of Apple’s products. For instance, if a user clicks a web link sent to them on an iPhone, it will automatically open in Safari. Similarly, if a user taps an email address — say, from a text message or a website — they’ll be sent to the Apple Mail app with no option to switch to another email program.

The Cupertino, California-based company also is considering loosening restrictions on third-party music apps, including its top streaming rival Spotify Technology SA, on HomePods, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing internal company deliberations.

Apple’s closed system to prohibit users from setting third-party apps as defaults was questioned last year during a hearing of a U.S. House of Representatives antitrust panel. Lawmakers pressed the issue of whether iPhone users can make non-Apple apps their defaults in categories including web browsers, maps, email and music.

Being a default app on the world’s best-selling smartphone is valuable because consumers are subtly coaxed and prodded into using this more-established software rather than alternatives. Keeping users tethered to Apple’s services is important to the company as the growth of smartphone demand slows and sales of music, video, cloud storage and other subscriptions make up a greater share of the iPhone maker’s total revenue.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

The company currently pre-installs 38 default apps on iPhones and iPads, Bloomberg News has reported, including the Safari web browser, Maps, Messages and Mail.

Last year, Stockholm-based Spotify submitted an antitrust complaint to the European Union, saying Apple squeezes rival services by imposing a 30% cut for subscriptions made via the App Store. Apple responded that Spotify wants the benefits of the App Store without paying for them. As part of its complaint, Spotify singled out the inability to run on the HomePod and become the default music player in Siri, Apple’s voice-activated digital assistant.

Now, Apple is working to allow third-party music services to run directly on the HomePod, said the people. Spotify and other third-party music apps can stream from an iPhone or iPad to the HomePod via Apple’s AirPlay technology. That’s a much more cumbersome experience than streaming directly from the speaker.

Opening the HomePod to additional music service may be a boon for the product. The speaker has lagged behind rivals like the Amazon Echo in functionality since being introduced in 2018 and owns less than 5% of the smart-speaker market, according to an estimate last week from Strategy Analytics.

Also under discussion at Apple is whether to let users set competing music services as the default with Siri on iPhones and iPads, the people said. Currently, Apple Music is the default music app. If the company changes the arrangement, a user would be able to play music from Spotify or Pandora automatically when asking Siri for a song.

The potential changes to third-party apps on Apple’s devices and the HomePod are still under discussion or early development, and final decisions haven’t been made, the people said. If Apple chooses to go forward with the moves, they could appear as soon as later this year via the upcoming iOS 14 software update and a corresponding HomePod software update, the people said.

Apple typically announces major new iPhone and iPad software versions in June, and releases them in September around the launch of new iPhone models. For this year’s update, Apple is also planning to focus on performance and quality because the current version, iOS 13, has been riddled with bugs that upset some users.

“So far, the company is not facing any difficulty in running the production lines as usual, but it is worrisome that signs of demand slowdown from set makers are looming as the situation gets worse and longer,” said an official at Samsung Electronics.

The comment came as Samsung announced the world’s top memory provider has kick-started a new production line in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, Thursday, dedicated to producing chips using 7-nanometer process node and below on the strength of extreme ultraviolet lithography technology.

Samsung said the V1 line, which broke ground in February 2018, began test wafer production last year and is scheduled to ship out its first products in the first quarter.

Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong visited the facility to mark its kickoff, according to the company.

It was expected that the impact of COVID-19 would be limited to chip production due to the industry’s mid- and long-term preparations to ensure stable material procurement and supplies.

Even during the extended Lunar New Year holidays in China, the memory plants by Samsung and SK hynix there operated without interruption.

Rather, there were positive forecasts suggesting that the outbreak would limit chip supply in the long run and therefore help raise chip prices.

But as the COVID-19 outbreak continues to worsen both in China and Korea, affecting the chipmakers’ workforces, the companies have grown uneasy about its potential impact on the industry.

SK hynix said about 800 workers at its headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, 70 kilometers south of Seoul, have been self-quarantined as a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus within the workplace.

The chipmaker discovered on Wednesday that an entry-level recruit who was being trained on the job in Icheon had been in close contact with the country’s 31st COVID-19 patient in Daegu.

SK hynix also said it had closed the company’s education center and sent about 280 new recruits home.

The company, however, said those measures were not affecting its factory operations.

Some raised questions about Samsung’s ramp-up at its NAND flash plant in Xian, China.

Due to withdrawals of semiconductor equipment engineers for the second NAND flash line at Samsung’s Xian factory, the new line’s operations would be hampered, which would affect its overall supply, said a report by KTB Securities report.

Samsung denied the claim, saying: “The ramp-up process itself is on its way as scheduled, although there are some difficulties with the local workforce. The ramp-up amount wouldn’t affect overall supply anyhow.”

By Song Su-hyun (song@heraldcorp.com)

Hackers sent emails with a malicious link, known as a phishing attack, to gain control of the facility’s information technology system, the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday in an alert. The agency didn’t say which facility was targeted, when the attack occurred or who was behind it.

It appears likely that the attacker explored the facility’s network to “identify critical assets” before executing the ransomware attack, according to Nathan Brubaker, a senior manager at the cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc. This tactic — which has become increasingly popular among hackers — makes it “possible for the attacker to disable security processes that would normally be enough to detect known ransomware indicators,” he said.

The DHS alert comes amid increased concern about whether aging U.S. energy facilities are equipped to ward off cyber-attacks that could result in power failures and disruptions to oil and natural gas supply. In 2018, several pipeline companies saw their electronic systems for communicating with customers shut down after being targeted by hackers.

Regulators have urged better oversight for pipeline cybersecurity, which is overseen by the Transportation Security Administration. DHS announced in 2018 that it was working with the TSA and the Department of Energy on a pipeline cybersecurity initiative.

Operations at the facility have been restored, according to an official the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who requested anonymity speaking about the matter. The official said the incident illustrates the risk that ransomware poses to industrial control systems.

Though the hackers didn’t gain control of the gas compression facility, the operator decided to perform a controlled shutdown after being unable to read and aggregate real-time operational data from certain devices.

While ransomware is usually designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid, the DHS notice didn’t specify what the hackers were demanding in the gas compressor cyber-attack. The facility’s emergency response plan didn’t specifically address the risk of cyber-attacks, DHS said.

The industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos Inc. assessed with “high confidence” that the DHS alert likely referred to an attack reported in 2019 by the U.S. Coast Guard in December, according to a Wednesday blog post. In that incident, a type of ransomware known as Ryuk — which has targeted organizations across the globe — hit a maritime facility, causing “primary operations” to shut down for more than 30 hours. Dragos didn’t identify the facility.

Joe Slowik, an analyst at Dragos, wrote in the blog post that the ransomware attack didn’t appear specifically focused on targeting industrial control systems. He added that phishing, the mechanism by which the hacker gained access to the facility’s networks, is a common “social engineering mechanism” that attackers use for both ransomware and infrastructure hacking.

The legislative plans, outlined Wednesday by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive body, are designed to help Europe compete with the U.S. and China’s technological power while championing EU rights. The move is the latest attempt by the bloc to leverage the power of its vast, developed market to set global standards that companies around the world are forced to follow.

Big U.S. companies such as Facebook and Google won’t get any reprieve from the commission, which in its Digital Services Act plans to overhaul rules regarding legal liability for tech firms and is exploring legislation for “gate-keeping” platforms that control their ecosystems.

“It’s not us that need to adapt to today’s platforms. It’s the platforms that need to adapt to Europe,” European Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton said at a news conference in Brussels. If they can’t find a way adapt to the bloc’s standards, “then we will have to regulate, and we are ready to do this in the Digital Services Act at the end of this year.”

On artificial intelligence, users and developers of AI systems used in high-risk fields, such as health, policing or transportation, would face legal requirements, including tests by authorities, which could also certify the data used by algorithms, the Commission said. High-risk AI could also face sanctions, while lower-risk applications should abide by a voluntary labeling program, the body said.

Facial recognition, which falls under the high-risk category, generally can’t be used for remotely identifying people under current EU rules – with some exceptions. The bloc is planning to start a debate on the topic to determine where European citizens would accept those exceptions.

The EU also said it would propose plans to encourage data sharing among businesses and with governments, with the aim of pooling large sets of high-quality industrial data. The AI plans will be open for public consultation until late May and will aim to propose legislation based on the feedback as soon as the end of year.

U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios encouraged the EU to “pursue an innovation friendly” approach that doesn’t overly burden companies, in a statement reacting to the EU’s announcement. “The best way to counter authoritarian uses of AI is to ensure the U.S. and its allies remain leaders in innovation,” he said.

As part of its Digital Services Act, the EU said it was considering rules for large powerful platforms that act as gate-keepers to ensure their markets remain fair and contestable. The possible legislation is seen as a way to complement antitrust law, which some have criticized for being to slow to restore balance in markets harmed by dominant firms’ behavior.

“Some platforms have acquired significant scale,” the commission said in its document. “We must ensure that the systemic role of certain online platforms and the market power they acquire will not put in danger the fairness and openness of our markets.”

In a statement, Edima, the platform association that represents platforms like Facebook and Google, said it “is committed to working with the European Commission to clarify roles and responsibilities within the online ecosystem.”

The EU’s package will also take aim at platforms’ liability as a global debate continues to simmer around who’s legally responsible for content on social media sites, amid the spread of disinformation, hate speech, and violent content.

Under current EU rules, tech companies aren’t responsible for what users post on their sites unless illegal content has been flagged to them. The rules were drafted almost 20 years ago in an effort to encourage tech firms to grow and innovate, and companies worry that axing the provision could potentially force them to censor posts.

“We ask the commission to tread carefully as they look at how to tackle issues that will ultimately determine the future of tech,” said Raegan MacDonald, head of EU public policy at Mozilla. “Instead of seeing tech as all the same – which it is not – the EU needs to be clear which companies and what practices and processes should be the focus of intervention.”

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg met with EU officials in Brussels on Monday as he called on governments to devise a different liability system for platforms – somewhere between newspaper publishers, who can be sued for what journalists write in their pages, and telecommunications companies, who aren’t liable for customer conversations.

Breton, the commissioner, dismissed Zuckerberg’s framing, saying his comparison to telecom companies was “not relevant.” The comment suggests that the EU could lean toward much more onerous requirements on liability for platforms.

Axon, the largest supplier of body-worn cameras for police in the United States, on Tuesday rolled out 1,000 new cameras for the Cincinnati Police Department that have live-streaming capability. This will enable officers on the street to show dispatchers or commanders a crisis situation in real time and allow rescuers to find an officer who is down or lost.

The system will automatically activate the camera as soon as a gun is drawn, a shot is heard or a Taser is powered on.

The cameras will not have facial-recognition capability, Axon founder and CEO Rick Smith said in an interview, and access to both the live-streamed video and the archived footage will be tightly controlled. To solve the problem of massive amounts of data piling up, the footage will be stored in a computing cloud maintained by Axon and Microsoft, Smith said.

The software accompanying the cameras will enable officers to receive transcripts of the audio in the footage, and the cameras will film in 1080p, greatly improving the quality of still images often used by police in investigations.

Police officers are typically the first on the scene of a crime in progress or a structural collapse. “To have the ability to access that camera in real time, and live-stream what the officer is seeing, that’s amazing,” said Lt. Stephen Saunders of the Cincinnati police. “That will be a tactical advantage in high-stress situations like an active shooter. Or maybe the officer can’t get to their radio. The dispatch center can access it and see what’s going on there. That’s a game changer.”

Smith added that “your commanders and support staff can have a much greater sense of what’s really happening” at an unfolding crisis. He envisioned officers turning on their cameras and saying “watch my back” or “I need help” to a dispatcher.

“The person in dispatch can watch and can deploy other officers,” Smith said. “We think that’s going to be a game changer.”

Though body cameras have spread widely among police departments in recent years, both as a means of improving transparency and also for documenting potentially controversial encounters, suspicions that they may be used for more-aggressive police monitoring have not abated. “The centralized live-streaming of body cameras would instantly super-charge the surveillance powers of the authorities,” the American Civil Liberties Union’s Jay Stanley wrote in 2016. “It raises the prospect of abuse, and will create significant chilling effects.”

But Smith says he does not want to create the conditions for “creepy surveillance stuff.” Besides securing the cloud and expecting that police departments will tightly limit access to both live and archived footage, Smith created an AI and Policing Technology Ethics Board to review Axon’s proposed uses of artificial intelligence and new technology. Among the members are Barry Friedman, a New York University law professor and founder of the Policing Project, which explores thorny issues and focuses on police accountability. He credited Axon for being “incredibly attuned to ethical considerations,” and his board has produced papers on facial recognition and automated license plate readers.

Live-streaming police video “has pluses and minuses,” Friedman said. “On the plus side, it’s possible being able to stream video can make policing more effective and more safe. If someone is contemplating use of force, it might help to have a supervisor in his or her ear. On the other hand, body cameras go into sensitive places. With streaming, it won’t just be the officer, but somebody else. There have to be serious limits as to whom the video is streamed.”

Putting another set of eyes and ears in a tense situation is a possibly groundbreaking option for police. “Part of the problem in policing, we’ve got individuals out there by themselves who have a lot of discretion,” Friedman said. “Part of the reason they have discretion is there are no alternatives. In serious situations, they might prefer to have better guidance, and we might reach better resolutions.”

With facial recognition, Smith said, “I came to realize there are Fourth Amendment issues. Should we be scanning the face of everybody who walks in front of a police officer? I don’t know yet.”

The cameras can be turned on remotely if needed in an emergency, Smith said, but officers will be able to turn them off at their discretion. Police will be able to seek video from the public through an Axon portal, and the new FirstNet dedicated wireless network for first responders should provide the bandwidth for police to use all this new technology without glitches.

The Axon software will have AI for face detection, not facial recognition, Smith said. This will enable officers to quickly find parts of video that have people in them and also to more quickly redact faces when footage is needed for wider dissemination. Smith said this will cut officers’ search times by up to 80 percent. The AI also will allow the transcription of audio portions of a stream, and the AI may be able to incorporate license plate recognition or driver’s license scans to increase chances of solving crimes. The cameras have 4G LTE connectivity to cell networks and a GPS.

Smith said one key goal is to greatly reduce the time officers spend writing reports, to get them back on patrol. “It makes it easier to create your records,” Smith said. “Over time, we can mine more insights from that data” to study the effectiveness of the camera.

The impact of body cameras, before live-streaming, is unclear. A recent review of body-worn camera research by the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University found that the cameras “have not had statistically significant or consistent effects on most measures of officer and citizen behavior or citizens’ views of police.” But Smith cited one 2016 study that said complaints about police behavior dropped 93 percent in six jurisdictions in Europe and the United States after the cameras were introduced.

Axon is not the first to offer live-streaming to police. Visual Labs, a newer Silicon Valley start-up, offers body-camera software for smartphones using Android operating systems but does not have some of Axon’s features.

Axon is packaging its new body camera as part of an “Officer Safety Plan” for $200 per officer per month, Smith said. The bundle includes the camera, equipped with four microphones for greatly improved audio, the software for the camera and its footage, unlimited storage space in the Axon cloud, a Taser weapon and unlimited Taser cartridges. Axon also makes Tasers, the electronic weapon that launches two darts connected to the Taser and uses the electrical circuit to temporarily disable a person.

The fact that the camera activates when a weapon is drawn or when a sound is received through the Shot Spotter gunshot-detection technology should cause more shootings to be recorded. Saunders said officers sometimes don’t have time to reach for their body-camera button during a fast-moving incident, but now it will turn on automatically.

“I think it will bring officers great comfort,” Saunders said. “If they’re out on the beat, they know that someone can find them if they need to. Having that sense of safety is not a no-brainer, it’s a cost, but the cost of not doing it can be even greater.”

Now, thanks to robotic cameras designed specifically for humans to remotely surveil and communicate with dogs, they no longer have to wonder. Every sniff, nap or destructive moment can be watched live on a mobile device. Dog parents can even remotely launch treats.

“It’s definitely entertaining,” said Cristin Bratt, a Fairfax County (Virginia) Park Authority official who watches Jackson, her Boston terrier, on an iPad at her desk. “It was a new concept for our family to have another living creature in our home, so installing a camera gave us peace of mind.”

Bratt, whose family owns several smart speakers, surveils Jackson with a Furbo Dog Camera, a cylinder device slightly larger than an Amazon Echo that has a one-way camera, a two-way speaker and a launching mechanism that tosses bite-size treats several feet.

PetChatz, one of several competing products, has a two-way camera that allows dogs and dog parents to see each other. In addition to treats, it dispenses aromatherapy. And the devices, which cost between $180 and $450, generate big bucks for their manufacturers.

Consumers spent almost $50 million on dog cameras in 2018, according to Grand View Research. Amazon, whose CEO and founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, said Furbo was one of its top-selling smart home devices this past Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend.

The cameras are just the latest form of human technology to crossover into the pet world. In the past decade, pet owners have outfitted their animals with activity trackers, swabbed their gums for DNA, and bought plenty of I-this, I-that products, such as the iFetch ball launcher.

What’s driving dog camera sales?

For one thing, it’s anxiety – for dogs and humans.

Up to 17 percent of dogs experience separation anxiety, and it’s not pretty.

“Escape attempts by dogs with separation anxiety are often extreme and can result in self-injury and household destruction, especially around exit points like windows and doors,” according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “When the guardian returns home, the dog acts as though it’s been years since he’s seen his mom or dad!”

That’s the primary reason Bratt uses a Furbo. Jackson is cute, but when his parents and human siblings go AWOL for too long, things can go south real fast. He once ate a down jacket hanging on a chair, turning the kitchen into a winter wonderland. He has been known to find boxes of treats and consume them all.

Bratt has attempted to dissuade Jackson from this behavior by speaking with him sternly through her Furbo.

“It seems to make him a little confused,” Bratt said, though the mysterious appearance of her voice distracts him enough to reframe his activities. Usually.

Then there’s the dog owner anxiety.

“It’s been our experience from day one that there is mutual separation anxiety,” said Lisa Lavin, a Minnesota veterinarian and PetChatz CEO and founder. “People treat their pets as part of the family. They are pet parents, especially with dogs. So it’s like leaving their kids at home. They worry about them. They have more separation anxiety than the dog or that cat does.”

Lavin is not being hyperbolic. A 2019 study in the journal “Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience” reported “hormonal synchrony” between dogs and humans during extended periods of separation.

“The relationship between humans and domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) has undergone thousands of years of shared evolutionary history, likely tapping into similar neurobiological substrates for attachment,” the study said. “It is not surprising that domesticated dogs are able to elicit human caregiving responses.”

Especially in millennials.

“Aren’t we the ones who don’t have kids but we all have dogs that we treat like kids?” asked Andrea Sosias, 28, a teacher in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Yes.

“We are seeing this a lot,” Lavin said. “So pets are becoming an even bigger part of our family lives.”

Sosias was standing in the kitchen of her condo with her husband, Alex, 29, a strength coach, and their two enormous dogs, Lola and Amino, who were competing for attention with voracious sniffing and kisses. In the corner, near a tray table of liquor, a PetChatz was installed against the wall.

Andrea and her husband use it to check in on Lola and Amino when they aren’t home. As soon as the device dings that mommy or daddy has pressed a button on the smartphone app to check in, Lola and Amino go racing to the PetChatz.

“I guess they are like Pavlov’s dogs,” Alex said.

Yes.

In the couple’s previous home, a townhouse, the dogs were kept mostly crated. After moving to the condo, a friend bought them the PetChatz as a gift, and it gave them the comfort to try allowing Lola and Amino to roam free when they weren’t home.

“This was a pivotal transition for them accepting not having to be crated,” Alex said.

“And it was new location,” Andrea replied. “They were very anxious being here because they had only lived at the townhouse.”

Amino would pace. Every noise scared him.

“With the PetChatz, we could check in on them, see if they were OK,” Andrea said.

Alex’s opinion: “I honestly think a lot of it is that they realize they aren’t being ignored.”

Not only are Lola and Amino not being ignored, but they and other dogs under surveillance are becoming stars on social media, with dog-camera owners posting funny videos of their animals climbing on kitchen tables, rearranging pillows, running in circles, jumping out of playpens and chasing their tails (sometimes for hours).

And because dog parents can set their devices to notify them when their dog barks, Andrew Bleiman, Furbo’s general manager, said his company’s device had alerted parents to fires and burglaries.

“If you have a dog that doesn’t bark a lot and you’re getting a bunch of alerts about barks, you might want to check that out,” Bleiman said. “It’s almost like a tech advancement for a dog’s original purpose.”

Yes.

PetChatz has introduced interactive games that dogs can play with their owners simply by the dog pressing a paw-shaped button attached to the camera. Lavin said dogs motivated by food are highly motivated players.

The companies are also working to integrate the cameras with other smart home devices, so that, for instance, if the dog jingles a bell a smart door could open so they can let themselves out.

“And then we’d would record the whole thing,” Bleiman said.

The day might soon come when dogs could bark up their own music playlists.

Earlier this year, Spotify launched a website allowing users to create playlists for their animals based on mood, energy and personality. The goal: “a pawfect algorithmically generated playlist.”

Get it?

Pawfect.