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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. "

15 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Next up.... by CimmerianX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Thought Police Alpha Version .501 right here. Arrest him!!!! Our system assumed he would shoot somebody.

    1. Re:Next up.... by durrr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This system will be hilariously judging when someone with ataxia or just a plain limp sounds the system every damn time he walks past. Or some poor person with social anxiety that is constantly harrassed until he refuses to go out anymore.

    2. Re:Next up.... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I suspect this system will see more subtle use. I suspect that this system will be deployed within corporations, and used to detect employees who are not satisfied with their treatment. Those employees will either be fired or promoted (to divide them from their peers and prevent them from organizing people). The purpose of a system like this is to enforce the social order, to prevent change, and to ensure those who are in power will remain in power.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    3. Re:Next up.... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist
      http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/youre-eight-times-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-a-police-officer-than-a-terrorist/print/

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
  2. Will it be as intelligent as Siri? by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  3. Re:Profiling? by VAElynx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Anomalous Behavior by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  5. Pure BS! by bogaboga · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    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?

  6. Here we go. by vikingpower · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  7. It's vaporware by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. fairly predicatable by andrew_d_allen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  9. Hah! Finally! by ibsteve2u · · Score: 3, Funny

    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"
  10. Needs mass spook-spamming by heretic108 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...
  11. Re:Profiling? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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".

  12. Bogus Research...FTA by globaljustin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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)

    Ontology pattern matching - comparing events on the basis of the similarity between their respective pattern components: e.g., a person’s burying an object and a person’s digging a hole are similar because they both include some basic body movements as well as the act of removing the soil;

    Conceptual packaging - eliciting the conceptual structure of actions in a scene through the identication of the roles played by the detected objects and trajectories: e.g. if you watch McCutchen hitting an homerun, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ player number 22 is the ‘agent’, the ball is the patient, the baseball bat is the ‘instrument’, toward the tribune is the ‘direction’, etc.).

    Causal selectivity: attentional mechanisms drive the visual system in picking the causal aspects of a scene, i.e. selecting the most distinctive actions and discarding collateral or accidental events (e.g., in the above mentioned homerun scenario, focusing on the movements of the rst baseman is likely to be superuous). In the next section we describe how the Cognitive Engine realizes the rst two functionalites by means of combining the architectural features of ACT-R with ontological knowledge, while **Causal selectivity will be addressed in future work.**

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett