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Researchers Develop Surveillance System That Can Watch & Predict
hypnosec writes "Carnegie Mellon university researchers have developed a surveillance system that can not only recognize human activities but can also predict what might happen next. Scientists, through the Army-funded research dubbed Mind's Eye, have created intelligent software that recognizes human activities in video and can predict what might just happen next; sounding an alarm if it detects anomalous behavior. "
Thought Police Alpha Version .501 right here.
Arrest him!!!! Our system assumed he would shoot somebody.
Camera monitoring hallway:
Subject 1: "You, citizen. Pick up that can."
Subject 2: "..."
Camera: "Oh shi-"
I said "The corner of VINE" not "PINE," you dumb bitch!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Uh... if it works, then so what?
Unless you assert that racial profiling would be wrong regardless of whether it works, in which case you have abandoned science and went over to the territory of ideology.
Step out of the vehicle. Or I will tase you!
It's already a too common occurrence..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
IOW this system will fight social change. If you belong to a group that has the short end of the stick when this system is deployed, you will be flagged for not accepting that treatment like everyone else.
Palm trees and 8
To use the words, "might just happen next", is just code for "might not happen next".
In short, it's just a loophole for scientists to get more funding, while emphasizing that their software does exactly what they said it would do.
We have better thing to do or worry about, right?
In my native Europe as much as in your great & free US: More surveillance state. More police state. More security craze. Where is this going to stop ? When are ordinary, yet intelligent people going to refuse to live in and contribute to such a state ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
No, they haven't "developed a surveillance system". The paper is two psychologists blithering about the potential architecture of one. It reminds me of the awful papers that came from the "expert systems" community in the 1980s. There's been some progress; it mentions Bayesian statistics. But it's fundamentally an approach based on parsing visual data into something that looks like predicate calculus and grinding on that. There's a long history of that not working.
It's an idea in the right direction, though. A key component of intelligence is prediction. Knowing what is likely to happen is a basic component of common sense, an area in which AI systems have historically been weak. With prediction comes the ability to ask "what if" questions, essential to deciding what to do next without doing something stupid.
There's been real progress in that area, but not from the expert systems people. Adobe Photoshop's content-aware fill is an example of a successful system which has a form of "common sense" - it fills in plausible-looking areas to replace sections deleted from photos. Related technologies exist for videos, and are used for motion compression and 2D to fake 3D conversion. Systems which look at video and guess "what happens next" may be the next step.
With most surveillance footage it's pretty easy to spot what's going to happen next: the customer will pay for their items, receive change, and walk out of the store. Unless you're watching it on the internet. Then, a car will drive into the storefront or a botched hold-up will occur.
A camera that can tell me if I'm about to be asked "Do I look fat in this dress?"
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I'm thinking along the lines of the emacs "spook" function, amongst other things. You just need enough a large enough group of participants working together.
The system can be trained in weird ways. For instance, if enough people in enough places scratch their noses with their left hands, then break out in a mock fight, the system will learn to sound the alarm every time someone scratches their nose with their left hand.
Or, for something more socially useful - have people pull out a cellphone, talk for a few seconds, then pull out a mock gun and pretend to mug others. Then, the system will freak out every time some annoying jerk pulls out a cellphone in public. Along that same theme, train the system to send in the troops whenever someone adjusts their underwear in public, or picks their nose, or farts loudly...
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Unless you assert that racial profiling would be wrong regardless of whether it works
It does work, and it is wrong. Blacks are more likely to commit a violent crime than a white person. That is a fact. So what? They still have a right to be treated as individuals and to have equal rights before the law. In the list of priorities of a free society, "efficient law enforcement" does not come before "equal justice for all".
The freedom to act must include the freedom to fuck up. (Though it does not imply immunity from consequences.)
So it depends highly on just what consequences you're proposing to attach to "detected pre-crime". If all you do is to "just happen" to appear on the scene, and in case of private property ask people to leave, then you can.
If you are proposing to impose sanctions on not-yet-commited "crimes", or even "merely" build tracking databases, then that means you've reduced freedom some more, in fact you've stooped to thought police. It means that the country in which this is deployed is no longer free.
Does it not? I think that's terribly naïve for a regular reader here, in fact for anyone with an internet connection.
Plus, there is the issue that such systems do effect changes in behaviour; you're effectively making people the string puppets of the technology. I think that's putting the cart before the horse, so this is a class of things we simply really ought not want. In fact, we ought to not want these things.
I certainly agree with your assertion of equality, but I will correct you by saying, "more likely to be arrested and convicted of a crime."
A better question is why are certain races more likely to end up in jail?
That is a big distinction. Plenty of white people commit crimes every day and see leniency from police, judges and juries that blacks in similar circumstances do not. Look at police recommendation for charges as well as sentencing for evidence. Furthermore, black people are more likely to be living in poverty, and poverty is obviously associated with higher crime rates.
Not that you said this, but many feel that there is something inherently different about black people that leads them to be arrested more frequently than white people. If white people were the "subdominant race" in America, we would see the same trends in reverse.
Not really an innovation; It doesn't take an intelligent camera to know what comes next.
Oh, I know that there is no safe way to answer it. But if said camera can warn me that the question is about to be asked, I can evade the situation entirely. That might offer me the opportunity to again develop/cultivate a worthwhile "significant other".
As it stands, I've found that my penchant for honesty is entirely too intrusive.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
poverty is obviously associated with higher crime rates.
The world has some very poor societies that are relatively crime free. The correlation between crime and poverty is complicated, and is certainly not "obvious".
If white people were the "subdominant race" in America, we would see the same trends in reverse.
You mean like in Haiti? Or Nigeria?
If your assertion that white dominance causes black crime was really true, then black crime would be higher in areas where they are a smaller minority, and diminish as they became more dominant. That is the exact opposite of what actually happens. I live in San Jose, California, and our black population is about 3%. We have one of the lowest crime rates of any big city in America, and blacks in particular are less likely to commit crimes. If you look at black majority cities, like East St Louis, Illinois (95% black) it has one of the highest rates of crime (nearly all black-on-black). I don't see how you can blame that on "white dominance".
I looked through the full text of the research (http://stids.c4i.gmu.edu/papers/STIDSPapers/STIDS2012_T02_OltramariLebiere_CognitiveGroundedSystem.pdf)
It is bogus. Wouldn't get published. They say the system *predicts behavior* using a systematic behavior ontology. When it describes their theory of the ontology it lists three factors in the system.
"Causal Selectivity" #3 is the one that links **cause and effect** its the part of the equation where your action (reaching in pocket) is either interpreted as something threatening (trigger bomb) or non-threatening (scratch balls discretely in public).
Guess what...all they do is say "Will be addressed in further research"...!!!
The whole basis for their claim...'prediction' is explicitly not part of this research. They do not even address the link of one behavior to another, yet it is the whole premise of their claim!
From page two (emphasis added)
Thank you Dave Raggett
Anyone can predict. Let me know when it can see the future.
You scan the PDF's and find it's for what path (walking) a person would take.