How the tables have turned: Bloke says he trained facial recognition algorithm to identify police officers
- Reference: 1603712645
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/10/26/in_brief_ai/
- Source link:
Christopher Howell, described as a "self-taught coder", [1]told The New York Times that his model isn't publicly available, and that he'd used it to help a friend identify a police officer. Unsurprisingly, the most difficult part of the project is collecting enough images to amass a database large enough to accurately match photographs.
Howell said he looks for the names and faces of police officers in news articles and public websites. He then searches for them on social media and downloads their photographs, a similar technique used by the [2]controversial facial recognition startup Clearview.
Portland has some of the [3]strictest rules on facial recognition. Law enforcement and companies are not allowed to deploy AI cameras in any public or private places. But there's nothing stopping individuals, like Howell, developing their own algorithms.
New open-source machine translation model from Facebook
Researchers from the social media giant have published the code to their latest language model, capable of translating over 100 languages.
The most interesting thing about the system, known as M2M-100, is that it directly translates between two languages without having to map to English first.
"When translating, say, Chinese to French, previous best multilingual models train on Chinese to English and English to French, because English training data is the most widely available," Facebook [4]explained this week.
By skipping the middle step of translating to English first, the meaning of sentences are less likely to be lost in translation. The researchers hope to keep tweaking the model so that it may one day be practically deployed on the social media platform. The code is all open-source, but beware the model is large and has over 15 billion parameters.
Cruise applies for official approval for self-driving car
San Francisco startup Cruise says it's ready to build a fleet of [5]autonomous robo-taxi vehicles .
In January it unveiled Cruise Origins, a futuristic electric boxy-looking car with sliding doors. These vehicles contain no steering wheel or pedals for human drivers. Instead, there are just four seats to pick up passengers.
But before Cruise can begin testing its self-driving technology using these cars, it has to get explicit approval from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to start manufacturing the cars in the first place.
Cruise did not answer The Register 's questions on when it hoped to start building its Origin cars. The NHTSA also did not tell us how long it typically takes to process such a request.
Nvidia appears to dominate latest inference hardware tests
MLPerf, an industry-led effort to benchmark the performance of AI hardware, has released its latest results testing how fast different systems and chips run specific machine learning models.
A quick glance at the results – spread over different categories like data centre, the edge, mobile phones, and mobile notebooks – shows that the most common entries come from Nvidia. Unfortunately, there were no entries from competing entities like Groq, Graphcore, Intel's Habana, and so on.
Google is also absent so this year's results don't seem all that competitive really. But there are some interesting numbers like Intel's stats for its 10nm Xe-LP Graphics chip (formally known as Tiger Lake) in mobile notebooks and from Raspberry Pi devices running Arm-based CPUs. You can see all the numbers [6]here .
Kite has added support for 11 languages
If you're interested in a tool that autocompletes your code as you write it then consider Kite.
The startup spent years building a model that employs various machine learning methods to analyse software. It behaves like popular language models that generate text by predicting the next word in a given sentence. But instead of natural language, it's code.
It has updated the free version of its autocomplete tool and it now supports 11 languages including Java, C/C++, Python, Golang, Scala, and more. You can try it out [7]here . ®
Get our [8]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/technology/facial-recognition-police.html
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/28/clearview_aclu_lawsuit/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/14/ai_us_dogfights/
[4] https://ai.facebook.com/blog/introducing-many-to-many-multilingual-machine-translation/
[5] https://medium.com/cruise/sharing-a-better-future-981ca839f4a5
[6] https://mlperf.org/inference-results-0-7
[7] https://kitestaging.wpengine.com/blog/product/kite-launches-support-for-11-new-programming-languages/
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: AI face recognition of cops
I was thinking now the word is out, especially in Portland, that he would be inundated with cop photos for his database. Is Snake Plissken now living in Portland?
Re: AI face recognition of cops
"Is Snake Plissken now living in Portland?" - I heard he was dead...
Re: AI face recognition of cops
Kurt Russell is still alive... Now the character? could be...
Re: AI face recognition of cops
IIRC everyone who shared that belief ended up dead.
Re: AI face recognition of cops
This'll make undercover work interesting if police graduation photos get added to the system, then of course there's all those federal agencies.
Local 'businesses' may well be making Mr Howell a very compelling offer...
Bottle > ...Genie
Re: AI face recognition of cops
>This'll make undercover work interesting if police graduation photos get added to the system
How is undercover work even possible these days?
So you're Mr J Smith and you want to join my drug running gang ?
Lets have a quick look on Facebook, oh you don't seem to have any presence on the web in spite of being 20 and growing up in America.
Oh I see, you were Amish before you decided to get a very short hair cut and join the underworld? That must be why you also stand to attention and call everyone sir .
Re: AI face recognition of cops
Undercover work isn't performed nearly as often as it used to, with the pervasiveness of technology. When it is performed, you'd better believe online presence is part of the cover... If the department has a half-decent IT staff...
AI face recognition of cops
Nah, just hack into the list of the most wanted ...
Re: AI face recognition of cops
...still not perfect. keeps identifying them as Paddy Wagon
Re: AI face recognition of cops
those drivers more likely to be wearing facemasks now too?
Portland
Would that be one of those CHAZ activists that actually believe that society is capable of self governing without police intervention..
Re: Portland
Or one of the ones that believe that all social problems can't be solved by giving the police bigger weapons?
Re: Portland
Society managed to police itself for thousands of years without an official government controlled police force. I am quite certain that we could revert to the old way without too many problems. It would create injustices that do not presently exist, but also remove other injustices that do exist. The fact that there is nobody alive who has experienced anything other than being controlled by government enforcers means that most cannot imagine anything different and think that society would fall apart and there would be complete anarchy were it not for tens of thousands of laws (with dozens of new laws being made every week) and a powerful and intrusive police force.
Re: Portland
Same solution to all bloated civil servants - Privatize it.
With the proper incentives it would open up a wide ranging employment among the disaffected urban youth to compete against traditional Italian-American family businesses outside the limited market of retail pharmaceutical sales.
It might even speed-up pizza delivery (obligatory obscure Neal S. reference)
Re: Portland
Omni Consumer Products gonna get that contract?
Re: Portland
The police started off as a private force - essentially organised "neighbourhood watch" groups. The police had a uniform but no special powers. The government could not tolerate such a thing and so had to bring it under government control, which is how it has remained. There is absolutely no way that any government these days would consider not having absolute control over the police, though ancilliary services can and have been privatised (e.g. forensic services, office management etc.).
Re: Portland
Unpopular opinion here and likely to get abuse from both sides but the problem isn't the police or policing of society in general.
It's the fact that police, particularly in the USA isn't by consent and holds itself separate from the society it was created to police. It adopted a "them and us" attitude which frankly has been reciprocated by mostly left leaning in that society.
The answer isn't bigger guns or more of them, it's both the police and society rebalancing, that's likely to happen after the USA election (whichever way it goes - that old man or the other one) I just hope it's without violence and BOTH sides accepting whatever the result is, because frankly neither is great.
Re: Portland
The reason policing is not by consent is that the police has become an unelected arm of government, used to enforce government policies (laws) rather than only keeping society safe.
Re: Portland
The fact that police even exist while sherriffs exist boggles the mind. I'll take the one directly regulated by the Constitution, thanks.
These vehicles contain no steering wheel or pedals for human drivers.
Well, that ought to make it interesting for test driving the things.
Or maybe if it should hit somebody, the passengers are supposed to ignore it and let the car decide to carry on?
Who's culpable in such a situation?
Re: These vehicles contain no steering wheel or pedals for human drivers.
The official driver is a numbered bank account in Liberia.
Hmmmm.....
>>>
By skipping the middle step of translating to English first, the meaning of sentences are less likely to be lost in translation.
<<<
Mon aéroglisseur est plein d'anguilles
Re: Hmmmm.....
Mon aéroglisseur est plein d'anguilles
Rimbalzante rimbalzante?
If you're interested in a tool that autocompletes your code as you write it then consider Kite.
No thanks, I already have EMACS.
I predicted this!!!
I recall making a comment a few months ago to a Reg article about facial recognition that it could be used to identify and flag undercover cops. I suggested in that comment that historic online police acadamy graduation photos could be used to train the software. It is a real possibility - maybe not likely to be in widespread use by normal members of the public, but organised crime and "action group" bosses may well use it when vetting prospective new gang members.
Re: I predicted this!!!
May well? I wouldn't be surprised if they already are.
Re: I predicted this!!!
Bad news for any evil twin!
fuzzy logic?
coat ...
AI face recognition of cops
> Unsurprisingly, the most difficult part of the project is collecting enough images to amass a database large enough to accurately match photographs.
But now he's told the cops, they'll be a steady supply of new images from the drivers of cars that mysteriously slow down going past his house, and tail him as he drives to and from work, the mall etc.