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. "

Pure BS!

[bogaboga]

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.

To use the words, "might just happen next", is just code for "might not happen next".

In short, it's just a loophole for scientists to get more funding, while emphasizing that their software does exactly what they said it would do.

We have better thing to do or worry about, right?

Bogus Research...FTA

[globaljustin]

I looked through the full text of the research (http://stids.c4i.gmu.edu/papers/STIDSPapers/STIDS2012_T02_OltramariLebiere_CognitiveGroundedSystem.pdf)

It is bogus. Wouldn't get published. They say the system *predicts behavior* using a systematic behavior ontology. When it describes their theory of the ontology it lists three factors in the system.

"Causal Selectivity" #3 is the one that links **cause and effect** its the part of the equation where your action (reaching in pocket) is either interpreted as something threatening (trigger bomb) or non-threatening (scratch balls discretely in public).

Guess what...all they do is say "Will be addressed in further research"...!!!

The whole basis for their claim...'prediction' is explicitly not part of this research. They do not even address the link of one behavior to another, yet it is the whole premise of their claim!

From page two (emphasis added)

Ontology pattern matching - comparing events on the basis of the similarity between their respective pattern components: e.g., a person’s burying an object and a person’s digging a hole are similar because they both include some basic body movements as well as the act of removing the soil;

Conceptual packaging - eliciting the conceptual structure of actions in a scene through the identication of the roles played by the detected objects and trajectories: e.g. if you watch McCutchen hitting an homerun, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ player number 22 is the ‘agent’, the ball is the patient, the baseball bat is the ‘instrument’, toward the tribune is the ‘direction’, etc.).

Causal selectivity: attentional mechanisms drive the visual system in picking the causal aspects of a scene, i.e. selecting the most distinctive actions and discarding collateral or accidental events (e.g., in the above mentioned homerun scenario, focusing on the movements of the rst baseman is likely to be superuous). In the next section we describe how the Cognitive Engine realizes the rst two functionalites by means of combining the architectural features of ACT-R with ontological knowledge, while **Causal selectivity will be addressed in future work.**