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DARPA's Cortically-Coupled Computer Vision System
BluePariah writes "Wired News has an article on a 'cortically coupled computer vision' system being developed at Columbia University and funded by the ever-curious folks at DARPA. Essentially, it uses the extremely powerful visual recognition ability of the human brain and couples it with a computer's raw processing power to allow a user wearing an EEG cap to filter through scores of digital images at high-speed and pick out something of interest. This has applications in military intelligence, face-recognition, anti-terrorism, and hunting down replicants."
Not only do you not have to press the button but you can look at the data ten-times as fast. Imagine this scenario: You're a Homeland Security Goon at the airport and the boys in the NSA have provided you with the face of a terrorist that may be walking around the airport. You memorize the picture of the guy, put on your nifty EEG space helmet, and tap into the face recognition system camera database at the airport. You then sift through thousands of photos in mere minutes. Human recognition works FASTER than human consciousness and therefore can identify the images before you even 'know' it. The EEG can detect the signals of your brain recognizing images and when it gets a 'hit', it dumps that image them into a cache for closer review at a later time. Think about it... banks of people in a windowless office with EEG helmets on pouring over pictures from every corner of the globe looking for whomever. Fascinating and scary at the same time...