Preventing Tragedy With Ingenuity

WHEN ARNAV DADARYA ’26 was a high school senior, someone reported a shooting on campus. He followed the drill, taking cover under a desk and keeping his phone in his pocket as a SWAT team rushed in. It turned out to be a false alarm, but the panic was real. Dadarya’s teachers “had no clue” about what was happening, he recalled.

Over three semesters, Dadarya and 11 UMD classmates developed a tool that uses artificial intelligence to detect a gun carried visibly within a school and track the suspect’s movements while school staff and security get automatic alerts. Soon, they will introduce their technology to the real world as cofounders of a startup.

In September their group, DefenX, earned $250,000 from the University of Maryland College Park Foundation after winning the inaugural Xperience Competition, an initiative from the UMD-based xFoundry that kick-starts the careers of budding entrepreneurs who develop a tech solution to a societal issue.

DefenX’s system uses video cameras, machine learning and a geographical coordinate system to identify weapons and monitor suspects. The students also developed a mental health resources guide for distribution following an incident.

“We’ve made this technology as beginning-to-end as possible,” says team member Srinidhi Gubba ’26.

The contest included 89 students across more than two dozen disciplines and representing each of UMD’s 12 schools, achieving an xFoundry goal to foster creativity and innovation through collaborations across campus.

Their members belong to the first generation of Americans for whom school shootings are an unceasing threat: In the past 25 years, at least 360,000 students have experienced gun violence at school, according to Brady United, a gun control organization.

Open to undergraduates and graduate students, the 15-month Xperience Competition requires them to develop an investment-grade product along with a business plan, product strategy and a presentation for investors. An optional three-semester course provides instruction in entrepreneurial concepts like team building, product development and collaboration. Competition entrants are judged by UMD experts and interdisciplinary professionals outside of the university.

Over the next several months, DefenX will refine its product and seek further investment before launching pilot programs in K-12 schools. A second student cohort is underway, working on technologies to address the next Xperience global challenge, centered on mental health.

“This program allows every student from every University of Maryland discipline to focus their passion, energy and talent on a solution that takes a major world problem off the board,” says xFoundry founder and CEO Amir Ansari, an engineer with more than 60 patents. “They’re building real, viable products on their own, with no spoon-feeding.”