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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. "
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.
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