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DARPA Unveils System Using Human Brains For Computer Vision
MrSeb writes with news about our coming cybernetic overlords. From the article: "After more than four years of research, DARPA has created a system that successfully combines soldiers, EEG brainwave scanners, 120-megapixel cameras, and multiple computers running cognitive visual processing algorithms into a cybernetic hivemind. Called the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS), it will be used in a combat setting to significantly improve the U.S. Army's threat detection capabilities. There are two discrete parts to the system: The 120-megapixel camera, which is tripod-mounted and looks over the battlefield; and the computer system, where a soldier sits in front of a computer monitor with an EEG strapped to his head, looking at images captured by the camera, wedding out false threats. In testing, the 120-megapixel camera, combined with the computer vision algorithms, generated 810 false alarms per hour; with a human operator strapped into the EEG, that drops down to just five false alarms per hour. The human brain is surprisingly fast, too: According to DARPA, CT2WS displays 10 images per second to the human operator — and yet that doesn't seem to affect accuracy."
This is scary to me, being wired up and used as a machine. Though I suppose it's actually no worse than other kinds of human slavery, and probably quite a bit better than some.
What's the next step? Jars. Lots and lots of jars.
Go Army.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
"displays 10 images per second to the human operator — and yet that doesn't seem to affect accuracy."
I know that that doesn't matter, but it affects the human?
I see an easy way to break this system
where a soldier sits in front of a computer monitor ... wedding out false threats.
Human soldier brain pretty good at telling the difference between a bush and a AK-47 wielding freedom fighter / terrorist / same difference when that's what he's looking for.
So give him a different type of bush to look at. I've never really been "into" the whole "naked chicks with guns" genre of pr0n but covering the walls of a village with posters like that would probably totally screw the guy up. "That's a bush! No the other kind! No wait she's holding a AK-47. No wait, she's not moving, thats a poster. No wait, she's moving, she's for real..."
Another tool would be psyops type stuff. So rather than your stereotypical naked woman, trust me straight guys REALLY like to look at that, you could put up 2G1C posters, goatse, rotten dot com pics, tubgirl with a 9mm, stuff like that. Too many icky false positives gross the guy out. Like a weird game of duck duck goose... OK soldier goatse goatse goatse goatse... Oh oh thats a taliban! goatse goatse ...
Another thing is screwing around with image capture. So as a kid I had a "wolf's head" tee shirt. Rather than relying on hacking the pattern matching algo in a human brain to mess up by using all kinds of paint blotchy, ghillie suit-y, digital cammo-y stuff, just take two poor bastards and put them in a halloween horse costume and have them walk right in front of the camera. Cam sees "horse" walking around, doesn't bother showing soldier who might not notice anyway. Also hack the rangefinder. Cam algo detects movement. Zooms in and see's VLM's wolf's head tee shirt. Shows soldier a pic of a wolf's head. Soldier says WTF.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If you are sitting out on sentry at night and really amped up, sometimes you'll see a bush move. You can even convince your buddy sometimes. Less so as you get more experience but it still happens. You can tell yourself it was nerves and ignore it, but for that one time when it isn't nerves and it really is a bad guy on the other side... I wonder if the computers can also weed out false positives from humans. That way you would have more confidence to shoot the bush and hit a bad guy hiding behind it instead of just waking everyone up and being called a bonehead for fucking up whatever little sleep they get. By then we really would probably be becoming Borgs. Speaking of which, on this article, I think that would have been a better icon than the HAL one.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Unfortunately the system proved vulnerable to a rocket launcher aimed at the camera.
The enemy cleverly foiled this new surveillance scheme by putting up large blown up images of centerfolds on the battlefield, thus distracting the cameras operators. The camera operators never saw the division of enemy tanks advancing and they were overrun.
Weddings? I love weddings, drinks all round!
Call Kirk Douglass... it's Saturn III all over again....
Anyone for a live action game of Shadowrun?
Perfect example, ties into google glass and is able to scan for missing/kidnapped children. Of course, the filpside, abuse way, finding cheating spouses. Information is neither good nor evil, just the users.
It's a job, and therefore not slavery any more than any other one. Also you are very stupid for even making the comparison, though I suppose you hear that often enough.
wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the world.
"Listen to me, coppertop. We don't have time for 20 questions. Right now there's only one rule... our way or the highway."
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
But I'm just wondering where I can get a 120 megapixel camera... Possible feature request for the iphone6 ?
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Ron Popiel approves.
I recall reading an article (or a mention of an article, or something) about an experiment where a pigeon was trained to peck a button when shown a photograph containing a human. The accuracy was pretty good, but there was one photo that it would peck for that didn't have any people in it. Or so the researchers thought until they used a magnifying glass to find one person off in the background... :)
A trained neural network can be more accurate and faster than one would think
Now you just put the guy in a vehicle, link the weapons systems to it, link drone control to it, network it all back to a control hive. Write the interface up like a game.
I love this kind of stuff. We need it in case we have to fight the screaming hordes who out number us, or if we want to be sneaky sneaky and take out nasty bastards who hide in other countries where we can't put boots on the ground without lead in the air.
So, everyone stop panicking, unless you are douchebag bad guys, let's embrace the madness.
Take the Red Pill.
..never heard of supervised learning
Oh yeah, it's called a video game!
If only you'd make friends with the rest of the world, you wouldn't need a threat warning system and you could work on good stuff like starships and curing cancer.
Why abbreviate it CT2WS instead of CTTWS? No syllables are saved and it doesn't help remembering what it means.