How Do You Vote? 50 Million Google Images Give a Clue (nytimes.com)

Artificial Intelligence is now being used to scan millions of pictures taken by Google Street View to glean insights like income or voting patterns, The New York Times reports. In a Stanford project, computers scanned millions of pictures of parked cars to predict voting patterns and pollution. From the report: The Stanford project gives a glimpse at the potential. By pulling the vehicles' makes, models and years from the images, and then linking that information with other data sources, the project was able to predict factors like pollution and voting patterns at the neighborhood level. "This kind of social analysis using image data is a new tool to draw insights," said Timnit Gebru, who led the Stanford research effort. The research has been published in stages, the most recent in late November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the end, the car-image project involved 50 million images of street scenes gathered from Google Street View. In them, 22 million cars were identified, and then classified into more than 2,600 categories like their make and model, located in more than 3,000 ZIP codes and 39,000 voting districts.

Comments

Re:How many gallons of stew from a few oysters?

[mschuyler]

It does not have to account for garaged cars. All it has to do is show valid predictions. The criteria here is not to capture every single vehicle; it is to record a sample of sufficient size. That's how poling works. No one has to know how YOU voted. All they need is 1200 sufficiently random people to accurately predict the election.