Technology

When police had difficulty identifying the man whom they believed opened fire on a newsroom in Maryland, killing five people, they turned to one of the most controversial yet potent tools in the statelaw enforcement arsenal.

AsThe New York Times reports, Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomaredepartment failed to ID its suspect through fingerprinting. The department then sent a picture of the suspect to the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, which combed through one of the nationlargest databases of mug shots and driverlicense photos in search of a match.

That database is the source of some debate. Maryland has some of the most aggressive facial recognition policies in the nation, according to a national report from Georgetown UniversityCenter on Privacy - Technology, and that practice is powered by one central system: a pool of face data known as the Maryland Image Repository System (MIRS).

For facial recognition searches, Maryland police have access to three million state mug shots, seven million state driverlicense photos and an additional 24.9 million mug shots from a national FBI database. The statepractice of face recognition searches began in 2011, expanding in 2013 to incorporate the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administrationexisting driverlicense database.The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) describes MIRS &as a digitized mug shot book used by law enforcement agencies throughout Maryland in the furtherance of their law enforcement investigation duties.&

According to the Georgetown report, &Itunclear if the [Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services] ‘scrubs& its mug shot database to eliminate people who were never charged, had charges dropped or dismissed, or who were found innocent.&

In a letter to MarylandHouse Appropriations and Senate Budget and Taxation Committees in late 2017, DPSCS Secretary Stephen T. Moyer notes that the software &has drawn criticism over privacy concerns.& In that report, the state notes that images uploaded to MIRS are not stored in the database and that &the usersearch results are saved under their session and are not available to any other user.& DPSCS provides these details about the software:

MIRS is an off-the-shelf software program developed by Dataworks Plus. Images are uploaded into the system from MVA, DPSCS inmate case records, and mugshot photos sent into the DPSCS Criminal Justice System-Central Repository (CJIS-CR) from law enforcement agencies throughout the State at the time of an offenderarrest and booking. Members of law enforcement are able to upload an image to MIRS and that image is compared to the images within the system to determine the highest probability that the uploaded image may relate to an MVA and/or DPSCS image within MIRS.

In the 2017 fiscal year, DPSCS paid DataWorks Plus $185,124.24 to maintain the database. The report declined to answer questions about how many users are authorized to access the MIRS system (estimates in The Baltimore Sun put it at between 6,000 and 7,000 individuals) and how many user logins had occurred since 2015, stating that it did not track or collect this information. On a question of what steps the department takes to mitigate privacy risks, DPSCS stated only that &the steps taken to protect citizenprivacy are inherent in the photos that are uploaded into the system and the way that the system is accessed.&

In 2016, Marylandface recognition database came under new scrutiny after the ACLU accused the state of using MIRS without a warrant to identify protesters in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray.

Last year, Maryland House Bill 1065 proposed a task force to examine surveillance techniques used by law enforcement in the state. That bill made it out of the House but did not progress past the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. Another bill, known as the Face Recognition Act (HB 1148),would mandate auditing in the state to &ensure that face recognition is used only for legitimate law enforcement purposes& and would prohibit the use of Marylandface recognition system without a court order. That bill did not make it out of theHouse Judiciary Committee, though the ACLU intends to revisit it in 2018.

Today at &Muscle Beach& in Venice, Calif.,Netflix and Lyft joined forces for a promotional campaign in support of the streaming media site(really excellent) dramatization of the origin story for the womenwrestling league — GLOW (or the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling).

Your intrepid reporter was taking a walk on the beach and stumbled upon the marketing stunt (which was kind of genius).

For those of y&all who don&t know, Muscle Beach is sort of a mecca for weight lifters and body builders — including, back in the &80s, a young Ah-nold Schwarzenegger. A history that made it an ideal spot to celebrate Netflix (pretty terrific) ode to all things new wave-d, hair metal-ed, neon accented, high-waisted, cocaine addled and muscle-bound.

Members of the cast posed for pictures, and wrestlers engaged in training sessions and &80s-themed exercise classes throughout the day.

The activation will be up for the next week and included a Reebok pop-up with limited-edition &80s styles; a photo booth and costumes for pictures; free copies of Paper Magazine and trading cards emblazoned with the pictures of each of the most popular characters from the show.

The day wasn&t without incident. Some Muscle Beach-goers got into a war of words with security over the eventunannounced takeover of the basketball courts adjacent to the &beach.&

The second season of &GLOW& dropped today on Netflix.

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Shak Lakhani, the 21-year-old chief executive and co-founder of Avro Life Science, started researching biomaterials when he was 15 years old.

Every summer and after school the teenager would travel nearly two hours by bus and train from the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Toronto where he lived to the tissue engineering lab at the University of Toronto and develop three-dimensional, in-vitro models of tumors using biomaterials.

For three years, Lakhani worked in the lab, before going on to study nanotechnology engineering at the University of Waterloo a short 73 miles away. It was there, in his first year, that Lakhani met another Richmond Hill resident, Keean Sarani, and launched Avro Life Science.

Sarani, also 21, had his own history in life sciences. A former epidemiologist who worked as a research assistant at the aptly named Hospital for Sick Children, Sarani spent his high school years working in community pharmacies before going on to graduate from the University of Waterloo with both an Honours Science degree and a doctorate in pharmacy directly from high school.

Sarani and Lakhani, who&re related by marriage, first met in the Village 1 dormitory complex at the university. Within months of their first meeting the two decided to start working on the company that would become Avro.

They formally launched the business in January 2016, a time when Lakhani said the two college students would hold &startup Sundays& where they would pitch ideas to each other in one dorm room or another on Sunday evenings, until they found an idea that seemed viable.

Given their experience — Sarani in pharmacies and treating patients and Lakhani in chemistry and material science, the two hit on the idea of drug delivery and patches.

The two initially toyed with a multivitamin patch for daily health, but through the sniffles, watery eyes and sneezes of perennial allergy sufferers the two hit on the idea of an antihistamine patch to cure their own ailments.

The two won their first pitch competition three months after hitting on the initial idea in March 2016, and formally incorporated their business in November 2016.

Fast-forward two years and the two co-founders are just about ready to make the final preparations for the first product with help from an initial seed round from investors led by Fifty Years, with participation from Susa Ventures, Garage Capital, Heuristic Capital, Embark Ventures, Uphonest Capital and Buckley Endeavours. Individual angel investors also participated in the round. In all, Avro has about $2.2 million in the bank.

According to Lakhani, the company has already developed a polymer that allows Avro to make patches that can deliver hundreds of different drugs. Now itjust a matter of gearing up for clinical trials that the company will run before the end of the year.

The first product, Lakhani says, is &a medicated sticker for seasonal allergies.& The companyplan to get to market involves revitalizing drugs that pharma companies haven&t been able to bring to market because oral delivery is difficult, Lakhani says.

&Really the breakthrough is the [proprietary] combination of materials that can hold all of these different drugs,& he said. &The method of drug delivery is the same as in nicotine patches. In our case as a result of the polymer and manufacturing method…. [the drugs] don&t bond with the polymer. They are micro-adhesives in the patch. Heat from the skin dissolves the polymer and allows the drugs to enter the blood stream.&

Basically, there are tiny bubbles on the patch and contact with (and heat from) the skin causes the bubbles to break and deliver any drugs in an unadulterated form to the bloodstream, Lakhani explained.

Because the company is using generic drugs for its first tests, ithoping to have an easier path to market to prove the viability of its delivery system.

Down the road, the company also has some pretty impressive pharmaceutical partners that it could tap. Avro is already working with Bayer as part of their accelerator program in Toronto, and that may lead to a deeper relationship down the road, according to Lakhani.

The first drug that the company is testing is Loratadine (a common antihistamine).

&In the coming years, we envision bringing a number of other patches to market for drugs addressing neurodegenerative diseases, cardiac health, analgesics and many more to improve drug delivery and compliance while revitalizing pharma pipelines,& Lakhani wrote in an email. &One day we hope to allow large pharmaceutical companies to ‘rescue& drugs that they spent billions of dollars developing, but failed trials due to low bioavailability, high liver toxicity from an entire pill being metabolized at once.&

For Fifty Years co-founder Seth Bannon, Avrotechnology is a &Holy Grail& for drug delivery that can save pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars.

&The market for this is absolutely massive. Initially, Avro can manufacture and sell patches carrying generics direct to consumer to address issues like compliance with children and the elderly,& wrote Bannon, in an email. &Because Avro can deliver many drugs transdermally… When you deliver drugs transdermally, you significantly reduce liver toxicity and boost bioavailability. This means pharma can rescue drugs that just barely failed in Phase III. Pharma will pay a lot for this.&