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How a 1960s Discovery In Neuroscience Spawned a Military Project
Harperdog writes "This is pretty fascinating: The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article about a DARPA project that allows researchers to scan satellite photos, video, etc., and have a computer pick up differences in brain activity to tell whether an image has been seen...images that might flash by before conscious recognition. From the article: 'In a small, anonymous office in the Trump Tower, 28 floors above Wall Street, a man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.'"
It just has a terribly documented API.
and of course stuff like this & google goggles is only the beginning
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Sir, please sit down and stare at this screen for 60 seconds.
(13.18 seconds later)
BEEP! Warning: this person has seen pedophile material!
After weeks of research to prove he's innocent, the man brings his family photo album in which we can see naked baby pictures that look very similar in decor, photo angle, etc.
That man has the saddest job in the world.
Things like plot and game-mechanic spoilers, shock sites, and things I'd generally rather not read or view instead burn into my brain even before I get a chance to realize what hit my eyes. Other things (however important) end up filed away in my brain's apparently vast realm of Please Jog My Memory, I Forget.
I'm pretty sure it's normal (if not crucial for natural responses like fight-or-flight), but it still amuses me (except when it disturbs me).
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
From the headline, I expected something about killing goats by staring at them (Project Jedi). We would have also accepted remote viewing (Stargate Project).
"Other projects Darpa finances include one to test whether sending electricity through the brain can accelerate learning; another that seeks to use psychology and neuroscience to understand which types of communication best convince those living in occupied lands that they should yield to American forces, a sort of Propaganda 2.0; and a project aimed at developing drugs that would reduce or erase traumatic memories."
How about the radio waves that interface with the CNS and brain, or the A.I. that has been torturing civilians worldwide whilst you nutters build your driver interface???
Fuckwits.
Next up: what's the effect on a human brain of spending half an hour watching images flash past too quickly to absorb? Eight hours? How do you keep awake?
Hook up a bunch of vegges with functional visuals to city-wide cameras (or whatever venue you want to watch). Stick a wanted poster next to the screen and wait for the spike.
What happens when he blinks?
Galaxy Zoo could possibly benefit from this tech. Or oncologists who stare at MRI images looking for tumors.
A human beign has been lowered to the status of "piece of equipment". Only in the US
Blipverts
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
is that Trump Tower is nowhere near Wall Street.
Oops, wrong site :(
Not helping an inverted tortoise. I mean, inverted turtle?
....begins the development of the Mentat.
http://slashdot.org/story/06/07/13/0822206/darpas-cortically-coupled-computer-vision-system
http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/imaging/a-brainy-approach-to-image-sorting
The one big (science) flaw in the movie "The Matrix" was why they needed to use humans.
They had some pseudo babble involving using the humans as batteries (involving cold fusion I think).
Instead, they should've had the machines using the unused portions (we're only using 10 percent right?)* of the humans brains for things like this, image recognition which machines suck at.
Anyway, anytime the Wachowski brothers need a science consultant I'm right here (Wisebabo :). (I actually helped with the writing of one of the episodes of "The Animatrix" but that's another story).
*I know that's an urban myth but it fits here.
What has been seen can not bee unseen!
In the original script the Matrix was actually *run* on the human brains, but execs thought that would be too complicated for the masses, so they changed it to 'harness the electrical and heat energy'. Which makes no sense, as electric eels would have been a much better candidate than keeping around a possibly hostile, intelligent race.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
This is already used.
In Japan, suspects are shown images of certain items found on "the" crimescene. (Umbrella, purse, knife, etc...)
The brainactivity tells who has seen these items before, and as some items could only have been seen by the victim or the perpetrator, conclusions are made about who is guilty.
What was the result of the military research?
"Citizen, you seem to have an unauthorised copy of our film in your brain! That will cost you a quadrillion dollars and 3 years in prison."
Also, how do they plan to filter out fake recognition events like déja vu?
He noticed nothing. Since only 1 image out of every 200 had anything of note, he has 0 false-positives, and that gives him a 99.5% success rate.
This will be interesting in a decade or two when they start using this as a court approved "lie detector".
Cops: "Your Honor, Mr. Smith tested positively of identifying the women we're accusing him of murdering. Although he requested a lawyer soon after, we found that the new NeuroIdent(tm) analyzer in the interrogation room remotely read a spike when we showed him a picture of the body, he also showed a spike when we flashed a picture of the murder weapon, a kitchen knife."
Judge: "This is the woman who worked at the Starbucks near where the suspect lives?"
Cops: "Yes, which is why we need a warrant on him Sir, obviously he killed her, otherwise, why would his brain have spiked when seeing her? Just like DNA, there's no possible way for it to happen because this is the same thing DARPA uses, and it's based on science Your Honor. We didn't find DNA at the crime scene, but we did notice the spike, so obviously he's lying about not knowing her and therefore, must have killed her."
Judge: "Sounds reasonable. I hope you catch the bastard. It's a good thing that the NeuroIdent(tm) is admissable as evidence in court, unlike those stupid old 'lie detectors' from years ago, that only reacted to involuntary stimuli manifesting a reaction in the subject. And since it's in the brain, there's no way he could fool it or it could be inaccruate."
Cops: "High five."
I'm a satanic clam.
They could couple these sensors with an image search algorithm of the NSA database and there you have it, the Intersect.
Obviously, the whole storing the database in your head is a bit far fetched but imagine a pair of glasses that contained a wireless radio that processed the input from the sensors detecting a recognition in your brain forwarding that to the database and returning a result back to display on the glasses to the wearer or to a bluetooth connected device.
I don't work with image matching but I do work systems that match based on text and phoneme similarity of names and places in data from disparate sources.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
> During his visit, Sajda was struck by how the analysts could tell, from only a few pixels, what they were looking at.
Wonder if they'd get the same results using non-analysts. Or if analysts who use this device would eventually see their skills atrophy.
BBC had a documentary called Out Of Control where they show this technology.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM_iiPFkNas&t=52m1s
It's a very interesting hour-long program. It makes me wonder if it is me that's posting this to slashdot or my subconscious overlord inside my brain.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
Obligatory PVP?
http://pvponline.com/comic/2003/05/12/mon-may-12
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
That guy got promoted from the goat staring department.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
In the original script the Matrix was actually *run* on the human brains, but execs thought that would be too complicated for the masses, .
Unfortunately, they were right.