Russia’s Creepy, Innovative Internet [video]
bloomberg.com
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Still waiting for social networks to search for you on other social networks, to verify your identify.
We're sorry, this photo doesn't match your face in photos on other social media, so we can't add it to your profile.
My assumptions are that the process is scraping social networks for tagged pictures; identifying and standardizing faces and then training a CNN network to identify individuals.
The trouble is wrapping my head around how to do that at the scale needed to uniquely identify 20M+ individuals. Do they train the CNNs in smaller batches and run the models in parallel? How do they normalize the results? How do the add incremental data?
I'm not as familiar with the models in face recognition but something analogous to word2vec may produce reasonable results.
Then, use a recurrent ConvNet at the end to pump out probabilities for each class (in this case face) with a low/tractable number of parameters.
What would pairs of maximally distant faces look like?
What would the mediods of a large dataset that was clustered into two clusters look like? Would it be a high level feature that we'd recognize like male or female?
Would faces that were mediods of the cluster be considered more attractive?
Would it be possible to build a similar app that allowed you to identify an individual from memory? Cluster the dataset and present the user with images representative of the mediods of the clusters. Discard images from clusters that weren't selected and re-cluster. Repeat until a handful of images remain.
Could that technique work as a virtual sketch artist and identify a person's doppelganger?
The library gets the picture as input and spits out a 128-element vector. The more similar the vectors are for two pictures the more likely they are of the same person.
You don't need to train it, there is a pretrained version available.
http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling
for recognizing ImageNet images.
Do you know if Skolkovo is still a thing there?
I would also recommend Sankt Petersburg over Moscow, having lived in both.
Though if you go as an American, you will be in a nicely padded expat bubble and the life can be quite comfortable. Just like in any other country.
The realization that should come later is that because people in the West have basic human rights, life is messy as its harder to control a population that's guaranteed rights. But in autocratic/dictatorial states many people are beaten, jailed, or simply killed with impunity or have a mock trial for formalities. Tourists will never see any of this and their Western passport means they'll never be shaken down or beaten or harassed by the authorities. They'll get preferential treatment because its within everyone's economic and political interests to do so. They mistakenly think this is how the locals are treated as well.
Sadly, many Westerners get the 'big city' autocratic treatment and bemoan the messy chaos of their own cities, without realizing that chaos is a feature, not a bug, especially if you want your 'features' to be the rule of law, personal freedom, property rights, an independent judiciary, and human rights.
From a tourist's perspective NYC, Chicago, LA are a madhouse of crime, graffiti, etc while Pyongyang is a wonderful, clean, and relatively quiet capital. You'd think the latter would be utopia, but of course, its far from it. My point is that a tourist's experience actually has the opposite incentives as a citizen's experience. An oppressed and submissive populace is nice for tourists but not nice for locals. A boisterous, empowered, and loud populace is nice for locals but not nice for tourists.
For example, I imagine the Paris and Athens metro systems go on strike a lot more than the Moscow and Pyongyang metro systems do.
In China, I'm scared of the police too but I know that I'll get preferential treatment because I'm a foreigner so excesses are less likely.
That said, I agree with your points, especially with China becoming more and more autocratic since 2013...
So, yes I'm much more afraid of the police in the US, they are demonstrably more violent. That doesn't mean that China and Russia are not dictatures, they are. It also doesn't mean that the police in those countries are not scary. They are scary and they are corrupted and will shake down locals (but rarely foreigners because it's too risky for them).
until my significant other got shaken down by the police there three times in the last three times we were there. so now i realized my first experience was skewed because I'm not the demographic that is the target of all that.
now i know better: your isolated anecdotal experience should never be the only argument for a political discussion.
As I see it, their real incentive would be to shut down the higher education system, because it a) costs money, b) sends a good part of produced talent to other countries, and c) produces educated citizens which are harder to manipulate.
Sadly, I hear quite a few confirmations of this from friends who work in education.
BTW, here's a great video, Rules for Rulers, which is basically a video TL;DR of "The Dictator's Handbook" that explains incentives of democratic and autocratic rulers:
Hitler got extremely far in the war against the USSR, and probably lost (in his words [2]) because the USSR rapidly moved production beyond Nazi reach. Also the USSR had a resolve to send millions of people in near suicide waves, something the French refused. Also the unwillingness of the Japanese to attack the USSR [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Speer
not much. In O&G all the complicated drilling is done by foreign companies who have the tech (while, yes, accounting IT in Russian O&G can employ the top grads :). In defense it is even worse - Russia still can't build a stealth plane, i.e. they were able to produce a body, the easiest part, can be calculated on computers with basic scientific knowledge, while the radar and engine require a well developed technological base and thus still not reachable for Russia.
Meanwhile it's not creepy at all that "Half of American Adults Are in Police Facial-Recognition Databases":
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/half-o...
At least in the text the author seemingly misses an important theme: there is a rising gloom in the Russian techscene lately. Talented programmers are mostly open-minded and keen to the western perspective, so the recent (~2012) turn in Russian politics was (and is) morally hard for a lot of them. All hopes for modernization, "westernization", and brighter future in the next decade were shattered, most startups now look for either government or government-associated funding. Like, the only way the founders of that creepy FindFace startup were going to monetize is to sell it to siloviks. The economic downturn also plays its role.
The future isn't bright around here.
Edit: seems someone thought it was sarcastic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (it wasn't)
To be honest I don't see how this claim can be compatible with your disagreement on funding. Startups are either SV-style (free market above everything, private VCs, fierce competition) or China-style (heavy government involvement at all stages, from funding to market regulations). So you are either "pro-western" or pro-govt-funded "VC". It is true that there are people with paternalistic view of the government, and all the talk about "import substitution" favors them, but that's exactly the point I was making: the future is gloom here for people with a classic startup culture.
Especially since it was very recently that huge structural transformations in Russia (Gorby's shock therapy) brought "westernization", "modernization" and a "brighter future" to Russia - in at least all of the US reporting. The shock therapy brought democracy (yes Russians vote) and economic liberalization (yes Russia is Capitalist society). It also broke what had been of an existing soviet union (another thing for the US to cheer about).
This constantly unobtainable quality that the US really would like Russia to achieve is submission to decision making for the world centered in Washington, and until that is achieved according to "western" (sic) reports, Russia will not have modernized, and will not have a brighter future. This kind of exceptionlist rhetoric holds ubiquity over much conversation in the American bubble, but it's pretty embarrassing when you see that it has no clothes.
Russia sees itself as uniquely important to world leadership. So does the United States. Neither is about ready to submit to the other's leadership in world affairs. Prospects for both Americans and Russians in the future are down, and citizens in both countries are being motivated against one another in jingoistic fashion to promote a national sense of unity and legitimacy.
The Chinese, meanwhile, are doing quite well. If they can hurdle some (admittedly big) challenges, they will challenge both Russian and US leadership in the world in a very serious way.
This is a unique and important time in history, in which the three major centers of world power may readjust in their orientation toward one another, and the balance of power may shift in ways hopefully not so techtonic there is another war between major powers (as it would be truly horrific).
On the other hand, our incoming wildcard of a president seems to be ready to tilt away from China and towards Russia, though what really happens will be impossible to predict. I'm wondering if this rapprochement may come down to both nations' concerns about China.
Watching the US/Russia/China dance over the years has made me think that Orwell was eerily prophetic, even if he didn't get the year right. "But we've always been at war with Eastasia!"
But yeah given Orwell was English, they've been at war there for hundreds of years.
Repeating propaganda about some eccentricities in the style of governance or opinions about fairness/happiness, be it old Cold War rhetoric or new 21st Century Great Game rhetoric, misses the crucial axis on which state competition functions and inevitably renders resulting commentary/analysis petty and wanting.
There's plenty to read in America about the creepy and corrupt Russians and plenty to read in Russia about the creepy and corrupt Americans.
But if you're wanting to follow the present like someone in the future is going to read a history book, the fairy tail elements, "good and evil", finger and blame pointing, and apologism have to go in favor of a sober realpolitik.
One piece of software I am very impressed by is Dmitry Shkarin's Durilca, a very fast and efficient file compressor, topping the benchmark charts. I wonder what he's doing now. And if I'm not mistaken Eltech's Exagear (close to native i386 binary emulation on Arm) was made by Russian programmers too.
I'm sure you'll find something here: http://sovmusic.ru
[p.s. english: http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/index.php]
Compare them to Chinese entrepreneurs. In China they don't restrict themselves to copy western businesses. They adapt to very Chinese cultural habits like having chat engines on online shopping such that you can interact with sellers or even haggle and bargain when shopping. It's what Jack Ma called being "the crocodile in the Yang-Tse": being specific to a culture, understand your customers instead of standardizing them.
Do Russians do the same? The video didn't show that. What it showed is how much Russian capitalism is a pet of the Kremlin.
However, it seems that most people reading this thread are from the Родина (rodina: motherland) and get offended by objective criticism about Russia.