The Benefits of Using SIREN
SIREN offers a way to ease counselor and staff burden while increasing intervention speed, accuracy and efficiency.
Information + Context to Make Informed Interventions
In collaboration with campus counseling and public safety experts, SIREN quickly identifies, expands and customizes the personality insights needed for very precise intervention strategies of virtually every personality type. For campus mental health providers and public safety officials, the administrative aspects of classifying hundreds of students with problems ranging from mild relationship challenges to potentially violent behaviors can be overwhelming, to say the least.
The Benefits of Using SIREN
SIREN uses a holistic approach
SIREN offers a wide variety of “whole-person” analytic and intervention recommendations to help campus administrators, counselors and public safety professionals provide better and faster student-of concern care, which in turn protects the total student population, the faculty, and staff.
SIREN helps colleges collect and integrate data into their processes
SIREN can help campus administrators, counselors and campus police/security perform better. It does so by providing information about all aspects of a student’s personality and life history. The context of past and present behavioral patterns as well as the current challenges that may be facing the student-of-concern is all part of the SIREN analysis. The platform considers student behavior at home, on the job (if the student has one), in social settings, within relationships and even the student’s conduct and activity while on campus, whether it occurs in the classroom or housing unit. By using SIREN across an entire population of at risk students and students of concern, schools can also easily collect and classify sufficient data to guide the what, why, and how that administrators must consider when writing and enacting new policies on campus. In this way, polices and administrative judgements that affect the student population become objective and data-driven rather than subjective and anecdotal.
SIREN improves campus assessment services
SIREN can also help campus officials who interact with students in crisis to improve their own inquiry and evaluation skills. This is particularly true with difficult or complex assessments where professional skills can vary widely and yet still have substantial implications for student outcomes and costs to the school. SIREN can both reduce that variation, and help all campus administrators, counselors and security personnel to improve – even the best ones. SIREN is the only machine learning assessment product available to schools and it can easily help campus leaders to leverage its digital feedback on certain aspects of the student population by assessing millions of behavioral data points across almost 20 different classifications.
SIREN surpasses human assessors and their evaluation instruments.
School counselors and administrators, as well as campus police analysts and investigators, are all just a few examples of professionals who conduct assessment of students. Not only does artificial intelligence and machine learning equal human assessors in analyzing human problems, it has also been shown to outperform the assessors. One December 2017 medical association study found that when working under time pressure and needing to make quick judgment calls, deep learning algorithms like those used at Psynetix Laboratories and in SIREN are more reliable than human assessors in using data to make correct decisions in the shortest amount of time. The study’s findings have especially important implications for student-of concern cases requiring fast turnaround because of potential violence. Further, most assessors are currently using pen and paper assessment instruments to try and predict student behavior. Those instruments are now outdated and are being rapidly replaced by SIREN’s machine learning because machine learning has been found to be a much more accurate predictor. This implies that judiciously constructed predictive models can augment human intelligence by helping humans avoid common cognitive traps. In a 2019 peer-reviewed study posted in the Review of European Studies, Dr. Robert J. Zagar and his fellow researchers found paper-and-pencil tests have a combined 39% hit rate, which is less than chance, while are machine learning assessment was found to be inexpensive, objective, reliable, sensitive, specific, and valid, featuring 97% accuracy and precision in finding at-risk.
SIREN saves valuable time
The important thing to remember is that SIREN is not competing with or replacing campus counselors, analysts or investigators, but rather its making their life easier and the work of student assessment more optimized. SIREN augments school professionals, helping them make critical decisions faster, because the entire body of student behavioral data is rapidly assembled, analyzed and placed before the counselor or investigator by SIREN in an easily consumable way that allows for clarity of judgement. SIREN is a collaboration platform and does not itself make decisions — that is the business of human experts, but it certainly renders decision-making more objective, knowledgeable and swift.
SIREN increases productivity
Increasing the productivity of knowledge workers is one of the significant challenges facing universities with large student populations. The ratio of staff-to-student is just too high. As an example of how well machine learning and artificial intelligence outshines human assessors one needs to look no further than IBM. IBM’s Watson has demonstrated remarkable diagnostic ability in gleaning information from large amounts of data. Watson accomplished a task that took a human researcher more than 150 hours to complete in a mere 10 minutes. Likewise, SIREN can place several student folders in front of the counselor or investigator in less than the time it normally takes a counselor to complete just one student of concern case.
SIREN makes human work more meaningful and valuable
SIREN gives school staffs the freedom to focus on their unique abilities. Due to SIREN’s efficiencies, staff is not bogged down with repetitive busy work or boring data entry. This allows administrators to focus on the meaningful work—SIREN runs in the background and gives staff the ability to increase the productivity of knowledge work.
Prediction and Forecasting
In addition to savings in time and money, SIREN’s machine learning is a better predictor of impending violent and self-harm acts. There are challenges to making forecasts in a complex and rapidly evolving world of students of concern and students in crisis. A body of research dating back to the 1950s has established that even simple predictive models outperform human experts’ ability to make predictions and forecasts. This implies that judiciously constructed predictive models can augment human intelligence by helping humans avoid common cognitive traps. In a 2019 peer-reviewed study posted in the Review of European Studies, Dr. Robert J. Zagar and his paper-and-pencil tests have a combined 39% hit rate, which is less than chance, while are machine learning assessment was found to be inexpensive, objective, reliable, sensitive, specific, and valid, featuring 97% accuracy and precision in finding at-risk. SIREN is the only machine learning assessment technology available to schools, the government and business alike.
"As former Police Chief for the University of Central Florida and Past-President Emeritus of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, I have long been troubled by the challenges of stopping school violence. By necessity, our approaches and responses have been mostly reactive and never technological. We can change that with SIREN, a proactive technology. Finally, we have a collaborative tool that synthesizes complex information and predicts possible outcomes so we can make informed decisions in advance of arrests or violence.”
– Richard Beary, Former Police Chief for the University of Central Florida and President Emeritus of the International
Association of Chiefs of Police