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AI Technology

How AI Helped Improve Crowd Counting in Hong Kong Protests (nytimes.com) 43

K.K. Rebecca Lai, Jin Wu and Lingdong Huang, writing for the Times: Crowd estimates for Hong Kong's large pro-democracy protests have been a point of contention for years. The organizers and the police often release vastly divergent estimates. This year's annual pro-democracy protest on Monday, July 1, was no different. Organizers announced 550,000 people attended; the police said 190,000 people were there at the peak. But for the first time in the march's history, a group of researchers combined artificial intelligence and manual counting techniques to estimate the size of the crowd [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled], concluding that 265,000 people marched. The high density of the crowd and the moving nature of these protests make estimating the turnout very challenging. For more than a decade, groups have stationed teams along the route and manually counted the rate of people passing through to derive the total number of participants. Though the use of A.I. does not make the calculation definitive, the technology helps produce a more precise estimate because it uses computers to try to count every person.

Since 2003, Paul Yip, a social sciences professor at Hong Kong University, has been producing a count of the size of protests held annually on July 1, the anniversary of Hong Kong's 1997 handover from Britain to China. With the hopes of creating a more robust estimate this year, Mr. Yip teamed up with Edwin Chow from Texas State University and Raymond Wong from C&R Wise AI, a local technology company, to use artificial intelligence to count the crowd at the march. Using open source software, The New York Times developed a computer model to illustrate how artificial intelligence could be used to recognize people and objects moving within a video. Analyzing a short video clip recorded on Monday, The Times's model tried to detect people based on color and shape, and then tracked the figures as they moved across the screen. This method helps avoid double counting because the crowd generally flowed in one direction.

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How AI Helped Improve Crowd Counting in Hong Kong Protests

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  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Friday July 05, 2019 @11:48AM (#58878048)

    It just identified every single one of them from their face, their gait, their jeans* and ears**.
    (the last 3 for the masked ones)
    Then it did a sum(above).

    *Wired had an article about it 20 years ago.
    **8 years ago

  • I'm assuming it is also assisting with the arrests.
  • It's a fishing exercise.

    If the Chinese authority does not allow any riot they wouldn't know who will take part.

    Hong Kong is wired, just like the rest of China's cities, and the authority is watching, and recording every movement of everybody every second of the time.

    Now the Chinese a authority has in their hand 1. The number of rioters, 2. The identities of the rioters, 3. The leaders of the rioters, 4. Where and how they gather.

    With big data they can carry out a further trace on t hose rioters, and with AI

    • it's time for big data to cut China off! trump just needs to say that big data ceo's can face the death penalty for any one that china executions.
      Just the idea alone can be used in an trade deal

    • This is no different than what is done for pipeline protesters in America, or any type of protest that doesn't support the big picture of our
      government.

    • Now the Chinese a authority has in their hand 1. The number of rioters, 2. The identities of the rioters, 3. The leaders of the rioters, 4. Where and how they gather.

      With big data they can carry out a further trace on t hose rioters, and with AI they can locate the so-called 'missing links' amongst the different groups of rioters.

      The news report is that Hong Kong authority has picked up 28 rioters.

      One thing about these protests - unlike other protests in the past, these ones have no leaders. Which is fortunate, since there ain't a 'choke point' by which to crack down on the entire movement. So no matter who gets killed, that one would continue, until everybody involved has either fled or gotten killed/captured

  • Last year, there was an election contest in one of the counties in Taiwan that was highly contested. It drew so much interest that many of the rallies that opposition parties started to play down the attendants. However, several industrious computer science students implemented an algorithm that was used for counting crop yields (lettuce and watermelon) and retrained it to count heads of people. Drone laws in Taiwan is pretty relaxed so flying drones over people right now is pretty much an everyday thing es

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