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During this interview, Carroll International's President, Byron Carroll sits down with Cory Perry and discusses various innovative and bleeding-edge technology. Some of the highlighted technology includes chemical recon and custom object detection software, weapon/threat detection AI, and wearables equipped with health, biometric, and geospatial data collection. As both veterans, Byron and Cory also discuss how these solutions can greatly impact and assist our warfighters.
Byron D. Carroll: Well, good afternoon, this is Byron Carroll, the president, and CEO of Carroll International. And we're here today to talk about some of the most interesting products that we have in the software category at Carroll International. We're a federal defense contractor based here in North Carolina serving our US federal government, especially the Department of Defense, as well as the VA, supplying our allies around the world, that helped to keep us safe. And to us, spreading the American values and America Way of Life. We do this because we're about 80% veterans and staff. And we believe that getting the best gear into the hands of the warfighter is the best thing that we can do to serve our country as patriots now out of uniform. And I'm joined here today by Cory Perry who is a software designer and a software educator as well as a veteran himself. If you don’t mind, just tell us a little bit about your background and what got you here today.
Cory Perry: Yeah, certainly so I myself was a warfighter and it is a pretty interesting story because, before that, I was a computer programmer. And you know it was a tiger trying to change its stripes. I joined the military, went into the special operations selection, became a Green Beret, served there, and served in Afghanistan. And whenever I transitioned I came right back to the software world where I started and we've been really trying to address some of the shortcomings that we saw in the type of equipment and the type of software that the warfighter was provided with, one of our biggest pain points is that we would see Instagram updated weekly, but we would be using 20 year old software
Byron D. Carroll: Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a contradiction In terms. We talk about military intelligence and using military-grade equipment. Oftentimes, you're using things that are very antiquated and that go into in the Department of Defense in defensive them, they have to go through so much testing, going through Jedic, certifications Gideon, to the proper contracts and being able to be put on to the network with all of the security. I really make it on the tail end and industry out there in front. Not having them to his regulations. Um, so we're gonna be talking about three different softwares today that we at Carroll International bring to the buying public and they're very interesting and we couldn't be any more bullish and excited about them. Can you go in? Kind of tell us the problems that you're trying to solve Cory.
Cory Perry: So, we are an AI company at our core. But we address every pain point problem solution, pair from a standpoint of taking humans for what they're good at which is knowing their environment, making decisions. And instead of trying to use AI to replace that process, we're using it to give humans better metrics for their decisions. We as humans we're great at making decisions sometimes. But we like to say we are computers. They're great at massive amounts of information and so we are combining engineering Web app, cloud wearables. All of the things that are out there and the industry today, combining them together for a holistic package that can put the resources and the hands of the warfighter and the decisions and the hands of the leadership without a lot of the macro micro managing that happens with the in.
Byron D. Carroll: Sure, one of the software that I think is just so ingenious is your chemical recon and what that specific problem is, and it's very very niche. But since you start talking to somebody who's in this situation, some of these have been in a stack, somebody's kicked, open a door and you get down to one of their deepest darkest. Fears, Can you tell me a little bit about that software? How it came to fruition, and a little bit about how it works and we know we don't want to pull the curtain back too much. We don't want to give any advantages to our adversaries but if you tell me a little bit about how that comes, how that's work coming to the warfighter and how that would use it.
Cory Perry: Yeah, of course. And that's a perfect example of everything we've talked about so far. So we were very fortunate in that situation to be able to work directly with Johns Hopkins.
Byron D. Carroll: Right.
Cory Perry: Some of the things they were doing with chain of custody and some of the periphery requirements on the chemical recon detachments and it was the same exact problem set of just too much information. Too many things moving around the integrity of information that would sometimes get lost as it transitioned. And so our solution there was to create an AI and have it on board a tablet. So that the troops on the ground, they're pulling out pins and paper while they're on target and this contaminated environment and that particular scenario time on target is paramount, because the quicker you get off the quicker you contaminate the, the more you mitigate Risk to life. So we're addressing that directly and not only are we able to decrease time on target but we're able to increase integrity of information. We're recording the scene where real-time taking the information back to the command structure, to be able to edge stream it, where identifying the different types of equipment and working with Johns Hopkins, we were combining that to help identify possible. Chemicals being constructed in those labs. Um, so the real intent here was that holistic picture of getting more information quicker to decision makers and a more consumable format.
Byron D. Carroll: Yeah, it's nothing like it having your team there been exposed to a chemical or weapon and not knowing how to treat them not knowing what you're treating them for in going in and keep me, honest on the square but the the competing technology is basically going in and getting very close to it and swabbing it and sending it back over to a lab and have that analysis, come back and then you can treat your team. Then you can call ahead to command and control and say, Hey, yeah, this terrorism. Sell this targeting this population. This town province district. What have you? This is what they need to be prepared for and that could take quite a while going back to a lab versus getting it in a matter of minutes. Or, you know, it must compress the timeline and I think this is revolutionary. It'll save lives and you know, When one of your loved ones passed away from anthrax, or smallpox or blister agent, that's a terrible way to die. And so getting the inoculations into their hands quicker is a good business.
Cory Perry: Yeah. That was one of the interesting bits of feedback whenever we brought it to some testing environments is not only was a very beneficial for the chemical recon detachments, but a lot of the kinetic teams that were there Gave us some insight into how helpful it would be to non-chemical regiments and infantry units. Because who knows what you're going to stumble on and they're not always supported by a chemical team to know…
Byron D. Carroll: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
Cory Perry: what they need to start pushing prophylactic meds for. And so this allows them to immediately capture that information, send it back and while they're waiting on a deeper analysis from subject matter experts, our AI will start assembling a list of possible contaminants so that way the medic on the scene knows what they're dealing with.
Byron D. Carroll: Sure. Yeah. And using AI technology and machine learning for what it's really good for is taking a large, large, culmination of data and compressing that and being able to give analytics on that back to the humans that can make a decision on it. Well done. So let's shift gears Cory,…
Cory Perry: Thank you.
Byron D. Carroll: Let's talk about another one that's really exciting with tons of applications, and that's your object, detection software, and using cameras, maybe cameras can see better than the human eye. Using the AI technology embedded with the cameras. Give me some of the use cases for this software.
Cory Perry: Yeah, thank you. And with the most popular use case, where we are seeing right now is with weapons detection, assault, rifles knives, edge, weapons pistols and putting those in places that are beyond the consumption of a single human watching a surveillance system. And that's one of the things that baffled us. We stumbled upon it because we were looking at helping a particular center with analytics and data consumption and metrics and we saw that they had a surveillance center with one or two people on shift and a thousand cameras. I said, How does that work? And the short answer was It doesn't, it doesn't work. And so you have these large campuses, large cities, large complexes with, you know, hundreds of cameras. And the same exact scenario of being able to take mass amounts of data and information and focus. The trained human professional on the pieces that matter. And so the use case here is you have 500 cameras on your facility.
Byron D. Carroll: Yeah.
Cory Perry: You know, you can maintain workflow operations as you currently do. But with our software anytime, an object appears that is threatening in nature trained by our algorithm. It will draw attention to the user who is watching the surveillance system. So it takes that span of 500 cameras and drills it down. So you need to pay attention to these two or three.
Byron D. Carroll: Yeah, very good. And then you guys take it a step further and use it in the use case. When I heard about it for the first time, it was very novel. Never heard about anybody doing it before or since, but talk to me about who came up with the idea to put it on ballistic shields. That really takes a, You know, a guy that's been there done that, to to go. Hey, we need it on ballistic shields because it's kind of counterintuitive, tell us more
Cory Perry: Yeah, that was a close relationship. We already had Marrero armor, you know, just being engineers and wanting to see their revolutionary shield technology. Then, you know, they weigh10-20% As much as a traditional shield and we'll stop 300 win, mag or high caliber bullets stacked on top of each other. You know, I came from Afghanistan where if I drop a plate too hard, It's done. It's gone forever. I got to get a new one, let alone it getting shot and I'm watching them put stat rounds on top of each other on these shields and you know, natural conversation about what we were doing. And it was kind of the brainchild of just two people who have been in the warfighter environment saying, You know what, we should put these together because one of their big problems was the bulletproof glass. They have fantastic shield technology, But the glass technologies are the same that's used. And they said Well you know the class that we're putting on ways as much as the shield. Let's just put a camera and your AI software on there. And as soon as we started thinking about that more and more tangible effects started rolling off of it, such as the communication aspect, you know, whenever you start coming under fire, see a threat or any time that the heart rate starts going up and you're in the field. Last thing you're thinking about is communicating and letting your other elements know what's going on. That's what you should do. But, you know, we're humans and we react to situations and that allows before the situation even starts developing. Hey, you know, this element over here has seen that there is an assault rifle present on the scene. All the other units can start coordinating. Now your leadership, your command and control. So not only does it help with the actual user of the shield. But it helps with all the coordinating elements and that holistic package we've been talking about.
Byron D. Carroll: Yeah. And the field of view on a ballistic shield is not that much. And so putting a big eye that actually sees better and knows what it's trained to look for than the human eye helps the operator. Helping the stack helps everybody in that squad. Platoon. Let command and control know where to send additional resources. Hey, your medevac needs to go here. The reserved fruits. They need to go there. Busy day in Afghanistan. We had 250 simultaneous missions going on and you don't think commanding controls want to know where the HOTLANDS are at? Said that they know where to send the resources. That's ingenious. It definitely in a firefight milliseconds matter. And so getting these guys in the cap of advantage, we can possibly get them. There's no expense to great. So well done on that. I think it's a really, really nice piece of technology. So the last one we're going to talk about here today is, your Garmin watch tracking, right? Some of the applications for that are military and even some of the ones going into the first responder and into the firefighter network because it really bleeds over. Tell me more about it.
Cory Perry: Well that when that one was interesting because it started out with a question of, you know, can we do it? There were some firefighters that we knew who were close to our cause. I saw that they had a similar situation of their technology, might not be the newest and greatest and they were, they were having issues. They lost a brother to hypoxia, you know, didn't have the right mask seal, wandered off into the fire and they lost him And so they started asking, "Hey is there anything you can do about this? And it was something we just pursued out of passion and found that with our existing platform, our existing engineering were able to tie in blood pressure, with respiratory movement and bloodstream, oxygen sensing to detect early warnings for that hypoxia and then we mix that with the the geospatial aspect of it. And we realized we had a fantastic command and control and accountability tool set. At a very high resolution micro level and going back to the same continuity of how we're trying to solve problems. We said, Okay well how do we take this and move it to a macro level and that's where the real power is. I know that it sounds really cool to have all of these technologies… But to me, the real power is a leader being able to continue their strategic macro workflow, while getting alerts and instant access to an individual warfighter firefighter. First responders vital and location to immediately track accountability of whenever someone arrives on a scene, leaves the scene, you know where everyone is. That's to me, the real power is that cohesive command and control while still having that fine resolution. And from my experience the requirement of leaders to have you know all the way at the bottom, resolution a detail at a moment. Notice those requirements are only getting more and more strong.
Byron D. Carroll: Well said Cory it's definitely a very powerful type of software and just put yourself in the situation if you can of having a firefighter and you don't know if they're, if they're living or dead. And before you send out, living bodies with families to go out and rescue. Somebody sure would be nice to know if they had a pulse. Right. You know These are things that they can track and just know how many people are there. I mean, for him, just a minimum of insurance purposes. Much less doing a headcount afterwards, because you may have five or six different firefighting groups responding to the same fire and to be able to put them on to the tracker. It's not out there right now.
Cory Perry: Yeah. And you know, the lowest common denominator problem that we solved was so crazy to us that it was even a problem. Going back for insurance records. A lot of these firefighters are getting cancer. And they can't even prove that the firefighter showed up to a fire with their logs and…
Byron D. Carroll: Right.
Cory: records go. If they just got so much going on and to me that's a shame and base level,…
Byron D. Carroll: Sure. Yeah.
Cory Perry: You know, who's there? And know their oxygen and, you know, they're so we're solving a bunch of problems with a single solution.
Byron D. Carroll: Yeah, definitely Cory. I know that you guys are always keeping busy and there may be something else out there on the drawing board that you want to. To tell us about, is there any other softwares? And I know you have to keep tight-lift about some of these because of the population that we work with and women's time to enter into the market. But anything else you want to tell us?
Cory Perry: Yeah, we are making a lot of headway right now kind of the way our systems design. We have a lot of security and a lot of high integrity systems that we've worked with and whenever we start looking at the biometric data and things like that it was a natural fit for us to move into the health space. So you know the firefighters and the warfighter first responders. Everyone needs a better record, keeping for the medical and well-being of their force. So We have made a lot of strides and progress in the medical space for electronic medical records systems tracking care diagnoses with doctors and all of the complete systems that would be required for a health provider.
Byron D. Carroll: Yeah, we definitely should take that to the VA. That's Carroll International's. Second largest customers to be behind the Department of Defense and obviously, uh, their warfighters too. The veteran. I know yourself and get the best care for the hands. The folks that look after our veterans and as it really important us as well. So appreciate you sharing that and thank you for taking time out of your busy day. To tell us a little bit about what's going on in these softwares, and many more can be found at Carroll International Reach out to us today. We'll connect you with some of the best software from folks that know what's good for the warfighter and whether or not you're a law enforcement unit or a civilian federal law enforcement, we can help you. We would love to and either connect you with the new customizations done to these. We definitely can consider those as well. But Carroll International. We're here to serve Cory. Thank you so much for the technology and how you've used your life to help others. And with that, we'll go ahead and sign off. Thank you.
Cory Perry: Thank you.
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