Archives 2016

“Research suggests that widespread awareness of mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public. A paper published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), found that “the government’s online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion.” The NSA’s “ability to surreptitiously monitor the online activities of U.S. citizens may make online opinion climates especially chilly” and “can contribute to the silencing of minority views that provide the bedrock of democratic discourse,” the researcher found.”

Feed the data of millions of people playing various computer games into AI machine learning and shaping algorythms… It’s already happening to an extent:

“The latest computer games can be fantastically realistic. Surprisingly, these lifelike virtual worlds might have some educational value, too—especially for fledgling AI algorithms.

Adrien Gaidon, a computer scientist at Xerox Research Center Europe in Grenoble, France, remembers watching someone play the video game Assassins Creed when he realized that the game’s photo-realistic scenery might offer a useful way to teach AI algorithms about the real world. Gaidon is now testing this idea by developing highly realistic 3-D environments for training algorithms how to recognize particular real-world objects or scenarios.

The idea is important because cutting-edge AI algorithms need to feed on huge quantities of data in order to learn to perform a task. Sometimes, that isn’t a problem. Facebook, for instance, has millions of labeled photographs with which to train the algorithms that automatically tag friends in uploading images (see “Facebook Creates Software that Matches Faces Almost as Well as You Do”). Likewise, Google is capturing huge amounts of data using its self-driving cars, which is then used to refine the algorithms that control those vehicles.

But most companies do not have access to such enormous data sets, or the means to generate such data from scratch.

To fill in those gaps, Gaidon and colleagues used a popular game development engine, called Unity, to generate virtual scenes for training deep-learning algorithms—a very large type of simulated neural network—to recognize objects and situations in real images. Unity is widely used to make 3-D video games, and many common objects are available to developers to use in their creations.

A paper describing the Xerox team’s work will be presented at a computer vision conference later this year. By creating a virtual setting, and letting an algorithm see lots of variations from different angles and with different lighting, it’s possible to teach that algorithm to recognize the same object in real images or video footage. “The nice thing about virtual worlds is you can create any kind of scenario,” Gaidon says.

Gaidon’s group also devised a way to convert a real scene into a virtual one by using a laser scanner to capture a scene in 3-D and then importing that information into the virtual world. The group was able to measure the accuracy of the approach by comparing algorithms trained within virtual environments with ones trained using real images annotated by people. “The benefits of simulation are well known,” he says, “but [we wondered], can we generate virtual reality that can fool an AI?”

The Xerox researchers hope to apply the technique in two situations. First, they plan to use it to find empty parking spots on the street using cameras fitted to buses. Normally doing this would involve collecting lots of video footage, and having someone manually annotate empty spaces. A huge amount of training data can be generated automatically using the virtual environment created by the Xerox team. Second, they are exploring whether it could be used to learn about medical issues using virtual hospitals and patients.

The challenge of learning with less data is well known among computer scientists, and it is inspiring many researchers to explore new approaches, some of which take their inspiration from human learning (see “Can This Man Make AI More Human?”).

“I think this is a very good idea,” says Josh Tenenbaum, a professor of cognitive science and computation at MIT, of the Xerox project. “It’s one that we and many others have been pursuing in different forms.”

Boston Dynamics, well known as a developer of robots for the United States military as part of the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,” has publicised its “next generation” of androids and robots.

Boston Dynamics was sold to Google in 2013.

We are free if we opt out of an endless regime of upgrades. Make the choice today to opt-out. I am not saying don’t use and don’t exploit the brilliance of mobile telephony, wi-fi, iphones and ipads and the Internet… I am talking about keeping oneself in check. Our feet are on the ground but sometimes we act as if we live in the Clouds. #getreal

“Sons are smashing windows, furious they’re asked to stop playing computer games. Doors are hanging off hinges having been slammed so hard in a fit of pique. Teenagers are holding knives to their mother’s throat, or threatening to kill themselves.

This is the pointy end of entitlement, the defining characteristic of this generation of children.

[…]

Mental health issues predicted

Kids who grow up insulated from difficulty and disappointment are also likely to struggle in adulthood if they don’t get into their first preference for uni, miss out on a job, or are dumped by the love of their life.”

An example of advertising meets personalisation for good-old manipulative marketing outcomes. Please excuse the barrage of branding/product mentions throughout the copy and media materials.

Also note how the point of deploying the technology is entirely covert and great lengths are gone to embed hidden tracking systems into the physical environment. Persons subjected to the advertising are also not told that they’re accepting a tracking device for the purposes of such advertising where the content displayed is specifically for tailored emotional manipulation much more than ordinary advertising. Persons later question if the experience was a “coincidence,” etc.

Emphasis added:

For two weeks this past spring, some shoppers at the Westfield Stratford shopping mall in the United Kingdom were followed by a homeless dog appearing on electronic billboards. The roving canine, named Barley, was part of an RFID-based advertisement campaign conducted by Ogilvy on behalf of the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, a rehabilitation and adoption organization for stray animals. The enabling technology was provided by Intellifi, and was installed by U.K.-based RFID consultancy RFIDiom.

Ogilvy’s ad campaign was the brainchild of William Godfrey, an “experience designer” at the advertising agency. Ogilvy is a fan of Battersea—and of pets in general—Godfrey explains, and he thought about how technology could be used to bring the plight of homeless animals directly to the public in a memorable way. “I had the idea that it would be lovely to digitalize dogs,” he says, and radio frequency identification seemed the best technology to make it appear that a digitalized canine was following people in the way that an actual stray dog might do. Ogilvy had considered the use of other technologies, such as cameras, but ultimately decided that RFID would make the process seamless and automatic.

[…]

Eric Jones, RFIDiom’s managing director, says he, too, is an animal lover. When Ogilvy suggested a campaign using RFID to put images of pets in front of shoppers on an individualized basis, Jones was up to the task, despite the short (two-week) deadline. It was a bit different than the company’s typical RFID deployments (which include document-tracking, supply chain management and industrial traceability solutions), and he says he and his engineers enjoy a good challenge.
 

The RFID system worked this way: representatives of the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, including Fishersmith herself, greeted shoppers at the entrance, offering them an RFID-tagged Battersea brochure if they seemed especially interested in pets. To better judge this, one individual stood at the entrance holding a dog or cat from the shelter. Every shopper who walked up to the animal to get a closer look at or pet it received a brochure. Attached to that brochure was a Smartrac Frog 3D RFID inlay encoded with a unique ID number that the system would recognize. That ID was not connected to any data about the individual carrying the brochure, since the company’s intention was that shoppers would remain anonymous.

Consumers were not told that the brochure had any special technology built into it. Therefore, an individual could be surprised when the advertising video changed to a dog—Barley—when he or she approached the billboard.

An Intellifi Smartspot RFID reader.

A total of seven digital billboards, located in or near the mall, were RFID-enabled, according to Matthijs van der Weg, Intellifi’s CEO.

An Intellifi reader (known as a Smartspot), with as many as six antennas built into it, was installed at each of the seven billboard sites, and some of the readers were also fitted with an additional external Intellifi reader antenna. The reader detected the zone in which an individual was located. Each antenna supported two to three zones, with a single zone’s radius equal to a distance of three steps that a shopper might move while walking. The reader forwarded the brochures’ unique IDs and signal information to Intellifi’s Brain software on the server, which then calculated each shopper’s location relative to that particular billboard.

The location data was provided to Ogilvy’s content-management software, which displayed an image of a dog whose movements corresponded to that shopper’s location. If the person holding the RFID-tagged brochure was walking to the left, the dog followed in that direction. As he or she approached the screen, the animal on the video seemed to approach as well.

The system also tracked which screens a shopper had already passed. This allowed the billboards to play only video images that he or she had not already seen.

Some reader installations were easier than others, Jones says. At some billboards, for instance, there was a power source to which the reader could be connected, while in other cases RFIDiom installed standalone power units to energize the readers. It was important that the hardware not be apparent, he adds, and RFIDiom made a few creative adjustments to ensure that the readers, antennas and power units were obscured.

In some cases, the readers were painted green and hung in trees or placed in bushes near the screen, while others were attached to lampposts. One RFID-enabled billboard was located on a nearby footbridge that some shoppers traversed to reach the mall. In this case, RFIDiom installed flowerbeds with false bottoms and buried the readers in with the flowers.

 
During the two weeks in April, the system tracked hundreds of shoppers. “People did a bit of a double-take,” Fishersmith says. “At first, they weren’t sure if it was just a coincidence that the dog seemed to be following them.” In some cases, they approached the Battersea representatives in front of the mall to ask if their experience had just been a coincidence, and many wanted to repeat the process.

Altogether, Godfrey says, shoppers carried about 700 brochures throughout the mall. The campaign’s successful result, he adds, “has put RFID on the radar” for other Ogilvy engineers. “I don’t think it will be the last time” Ogilvy will use such technology, he predicts, noting that the specific campaign will need to be one that benefits from the sense of having content follow an individual (in the same way Barley did).

“The main thing is that we proved it could be done,” Jones says, speaking on behalf of Intellifi and RFIdiom.

Here is some footage of people “interacting” with the system as part of the marketing campaign. The footage is basically an ad, it’s from the campaign’s website: