Alibaba is investing huge sums in AI research and resources
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
At the risk of sounding cynical, what is more impressive is that even if the kiosk either mis-identifies a voice or zeroes-in on the wrong person or mis-transcribes the incoming speech or parses incorrectly or cannot compare a person face or unable to connect to the database or identification takes more than a minute - no one will ever ever hear about it. The person complaining might get some points from his social score or go to jail.
But, we will get an article from MIT making it sound like everything works flawlessly.
If you don't test something then it's 100% reliable.
Andrew Ng had a great demo of detecting one voice in a party environment in one of his old classes. It was a matlab/octave one-liner.
Here in the US, we have had some fine successes by organizations like DARPA ‘going long’ and taking funding risks. Now the Chinese are doing the same.
Well, I don't want to speak to the draconian political implications of this -- that is a separate issue with troubling implications -- but I do want to address the general notion that imperfection should prevent a system (any system) from being practical.
Just because it's not perfect doesn't mean it is not usable -- you just need to create rules that govern what actions can be taken. We do this with almost any real world system (vehicle routing, plant control, etc.). No predictive model is perfect, and we practitioners understand this and regulate our behavior accordingly, often through simple rules. We build in checks, overrides and recourses. Us techies often think of technological solutions as being all-encompassing, forget how much of a human element (and human judgment) there is in real-world feedback loops.
Also, lest people think parsing out multiple sources from a signal is a new thing, Blind Source Separation [0] is the name that has been given to the study of this type of problem (sometimes called the "cocktail party problem"), and it has been studied for decades. Like most model inversion problems, it's known to be an underdetermined problem, and it is also known that you cannot get perfect separation all the time, but you can get a certain degree of separation if there is some signal (however weak) that helps discrimination. So it's not like practitioners have no idea about the potential issues -- most are acutely aware of them. This doesn't diminish the fact that the algorithms do actually work, for some definition of "work".
Techniques like ICA and NMF preceded DL approaches. It sounds like DL (deep learning) approaches hold promise on these types of problems, and this is something of note.
Here is the fundamental problem in a nutshell:
The governments of China and the US simply don't care what we think.
That's the problem we need to solve.
Made it past the censors. I guess there are _some_ differences.
And you don’t need to buy a ticket if your RF transit card is filled up, so the point of the kiosk checking ID via facial recognition is even weirder. Maybe they setup that condition for expository reasons? There is no way kiosks are going to screen everyone during rush hour, even if they work perfectly.
I find the subway so annoying in china. It worked well until they started those damn security checkpoints, after that I just couldn’t justify taking it rather than a taxi.
The points where bags are scanned? It is annoying. It is a security farce. It does only take a few tens of seconds, less than a minute. Unless in peak hours, then perhaps a minute more, where taxis would take 4x to 5x to take where the subway puts you.
Of course, traffic will make taxis slower. But it always seemed to work out faster for me unless I had to leave at peak peak, and Beijing traffic makes shanghai’s look reasonable.
Taking the train does require an ID card (or passport), as does taking a domestic flight.
Instead, China is viewed as an opportunity (to be exploited).
Apple, Dell, IBM, everyone, used them as cheap labor to get manufacturing costs down. So that they can sell that sweet iPhone for $1000, and make $800 in profits. Apple stock goes up. Your 401k is more valuable.
Then, there are more iPhone users in China, than there are in the United States. Apple can make more money selling services (music, apps, subscriptions) to them, than they do in the United States. Do you want to take away this sweet money tree from Apple?
Walmart views China as a cheap manufacturer. You can buy more plastic trinkets for less. So you spend more money, to buy more things. Win for you. Win for Walmart. Walmart stock goes up. Your 401k is more valuable.
If you want to kill the lucrative trade partnership with China, then you had better give a good explanation to all the people with their cushy 401k, why their retirement accounts are tanking.
The trade with China, may suck for the blue collar class, but it is very lucrative for the investor class. And for you, your 401k gets a nice bounce, so that you too, can get a share of the profits.
This is a huge deal, and even though steel tariffs aren't a great solution, I at least appreciate that our government is treating China's behavior as a real threat.
"steel tariffs aren't a great solution"