AI-Powered Body Scanners Could Soon Speed Up Your Airport Check-in (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on the Guardian:A startup bankrolled by Bill Gates is about to conduct the first public trials of high-speed body scanners powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the Guardian can reveal. According to documents filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Boston-based Evolv Technology is planning to test its system at Union Station in Washington DC, in Los Angeles's Union Station metro and at Denver international airport. Evolv uses the same millimetre-wave radio frequencies as the controversial, and painfully slow, body scanners now found at many airport security checkpoints. However, the new device can complete its scan in a fraction of second, using computer vision and machine learning to spot guns and bombs. This means passengers can simply walk through a scanning gate without stopping or even slowing down -- like the hi-tech scanners seen in the 1990 sci-fi film Total Recall. A nearby security guard with a tablet is then shown either an "all-clear" sign, or a photo of the person with suspicious areas highlighted. Evolv says the system can scan 800 people an hour, without anyone having to remove their keys, coins or cellphones.

Comments

You know what that means.

[AdamThor]

The easier it is to scan you, the more often you will be scanned.

Buzzword du jour

[ConceptJunkie]

I am so sick of hearing about "Artificial Intelligence". There's nothing intelligent about it. It's just fancy pattern-matching, because that's all we can do at this point. It's better pattern-matching than we've been able to do before, but it's pure hype to call it "AI".

Re:Buzzword du jour

[Tablizer]

There's nothing intelligent about it. It's just fancy pattern-matching

The problem is that there is no clear-cut definition or dividing line. I've seen long online debates about this, and there are no good lines in the sand yet. All attempts failed key tests offered up, or were too subjective to evaluate well.

For one, we still don't know enough about how the human brain works such that we cannot say what distinguishes things called "AI" from something as powerful as the human brain. For all we know, the human brain is merely "fancy pattern matching" at a level of fanciness we don't understand yet.

Some call pattern-matching AI "lossy statistical analysis for the sake of speed/cost".

I suspect human brains also (typically) use abstract modelling of various sorts where symbols or some kind of ID's with attributes/links/factors are stand-in's for actual people and things to simplify certain cognitive processes. Thus, the human brain may merely be "fancy pattern matching" coordinated with "fancy modelling": statistics + modeling.

Various known AI techniques use pattern matching and others use modelling, BUT nobody has found a way to coordinate them together in a general-purpose way to reinforce each other (triangulate). It's as if we got all the key parts, but don't know how to put them together right. We don't know how to build central governors to coordinate AI "organs" for common goals.

Re:Buzzword du jour

[Tablizer]

Antagonistic training explicitly exploits this feature with two systems, one that tries to learn to spot real data from faked, and another that tries to learn to fool the first one.

That's called "marriage".

Just not the same

[Copid]

But can it steal your iPad from your checked bag?

Can it roll its eyes at you because you don't know that the latest rev of the asinine rules about which things go in which bin?

It's going to be a while before we can truly replace everything humans do for us.

Re:The scanning bit isn't the problem

[frangryphon200]

I have seen a demo of this tech. It really is fast and easy to use and go through. You just walk through it, wearing everything. The only caveat that I saw was that people had to be separated by about 6-8 feet as they walked through to let the scanner work properly.