At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU
algorithmwatch.org
algorithmwatch.org
Okay, will we at some point admit that we want machine learning algorithms to be able to interface with symbolic rules rather than pretending that everything is a data issue as if we're living in the era of 1930s inductionism? It's clear that the misgendering issue here is not a stochastic one that ought to be solved by 'balancing out' data, it's that we want to impose strict linguistic rules and constraints on a system in a clear manner.
There really needs to be more work done in AI that makes it possible to interface with the models we built rather than trying to reframe everything as a data problem and then shove it in some end-to-end black box and then hope that whatever comes out at the other end is correct.
The automated systems used in the article are supposed to make judgements about "Detection of body movements that constitute assault." This requires genuine understanding and high-level capacity to reason rather than just pixel-based inference from some camera.
Of course, some people are unhappy about it and experimenting with gender stars and gender gaps and other creative orthography, but this is the status quo.
It's quite strange to demand that some ML model is more "progressive" than society and speakers themselves.
And it's not strange at all to demand of an automated system that it behaves exactly the way we want it to behave. It is not human, it has to be more precise because it is rolled out at scale and it needs to do what we tell it to do. When we use industrial machinery in manufacturing we don't go "ah well humans are only precise down to a centimetre, guess we'll let it slide". An automated car trained on speeding drivers must not learn to speed. Automated systems are faster than humans, so errors compound, which requires more precision on part of a machine. If a ML system accidentally learns that ignoring someone wearing a green shirt is okay, and that is rolled out to a million cars, you don't have an accident but a big disaster.
We need a way to interface with ML systems in ways that let us put precise limits on when it makes inferences from data, why it made those inferences and when to follow logical rules, and when to dispose of certain data.
Why does declination of nouns exist in German, is almost non-existant in English, more pronounced in Latin, and even more of it in Ancient Greek?
Is one of these languages defective? Should they shed their cases?
Occupations generally have a male and a female variant and as far as I know you are required to address both in formal speech (so I wouldn't call this an "experiment" anymore).
The only area where I'd say this isn't implemented yet is informal speech. Few people watch their day-to-day language for gender neutrality.
Now you are being sexist. Of course Krankenschwester is used but it has a different meaning than Krankenbruder
> Occupations generally have a male and a female variant and as far as I know you are required to address both in formal speech (so I wouldn't call this an "experiment" anymore).
In many languages there are occupations which are specifficaly related to specific genres.
> The only area where I'd say this isn't implemented yet is informal speech. Few people watch their day-to-day language for gender neutrality.
This has become something disgusting. A mother is a mother. A father is a father. A mother can give birth, a father not. Some things will always be gender specific. Or shall we start calling people gender neutral: Mr./Mrs. Donald Trump
People forget that English has reinvented itself for the last hundred years and it's not showing any signs of slowing down, whereas German-speaking culture is a little more resistant to the mores of newspeak. Until you lived and loved in both languages it's not really clear how equitable German culture is, in comparison to English. A German might say there is a level of respect in calling something feminine, whereas an English-only speaker might react with abhorrence. Such misunderstandings are to be expected across the language barrier.
And (this is an opinion now) I don't think that's "disgusting". Agreed, it's kinda clunky to always mention both variants but stereotypes are subtle and this is one thing we can do that's not too invasive. Of course this isn't an ideal solution either because gender non-conformity exists and the German language has no good way of addressing a lot of that. (But there are deeper cultural problems there.)
Also, I'm not sure what you mean with "Krankenbruder" but it sounds like something from /r/ich_iel.
A sentence like 'doctor said no' gets translated into 'daktaras pasakė ne'. Even a human could not translate any better unless wider context is known,which could only be derived from other sentences in the paragraph.
That is a long way off. We find ourselves in a situation where we have models that do useful things, but are also horrendously biased.
If you want improvement now, the quickest way to get it is recasting benchmarks. Most NLP research groups just hill climb on GLUE or whatever. What gets measured gets managed, and bias is not being systematically measured.
Right now language models can't even compare ages that fall outside the 20-100 range, and it is really unlikely that we are going to quickly get to architectures with symbolic reasoning sophisticated enough to squelch bias.
To Google's credit, they are working to measure (and therefore manage) bias [2].
That doesn't say that much, as most of France is under right-wing leadership at the moment (president is centre-right)
He doesn't appeal to conservatives, neither to the left but considering the circumstances it was an easy win for him. I'd say its voter-base are the educated, urban professionals.
I think the desire to monitor like this tends to be more about human nature and less about a given political ideology.
Also source article is really incoherent I do not know what author tried to say maybe some vague claim about possible bribery? Those newspapers are owned by czech PM and he uses them to attack political opponents. I would not believe a word from them otherwise there is another source.
Prague is now ruled by Pirate party and they are against using cameras for surveillance. They stated it in November 2019 when police wanted to start using face recognition. I am not sure why they added Prague to the list.
There are many sources in german about this topic, some praising it, some are more critical. Another such "pilot project" is run at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof and that one got a lot more bad feedback, because they also "try" facial recognition and tracking smart phone signals.
It should be noted that the european union invested into this technology starting with the 7th Framework Programm in 2007 under the codenames INDECT, ADABTS and SAMURAI. Expect to be flagged for "abnormal, possibly criminal behaviour" in the future if you run or loiter at a large train station.
What's more, in my experience police in Heidelberg is outstandingly slow to respond. I once reported a mass brawl of ~100 people not far away from Bismarckplatz and police didn't care to arrive until 20min later (with two officers…).
In Darmstadt the central tram hub "Luisenplatz" is going to get modern video surveillance, too. Bought from Dallmeier Electronic GmbH & Co. KG. The mayor said no facial regocnition is planned, even if the vendor offers integration with such systems. Its unknown if advanced behavior analysis is included. It is likely that all cities buy from different vendors and may get very different quality of automated video content analysis.
In Hannover the local police veiled their own cameras last year during a demonstration against a new police law. The demonstration asked for that and announced to go to a court and the police just complied without waiting for a court order, as they wanted to show clearly that they are not interested in filming and (possibly) personally identifying their political opposition. When the city council in Darmstadt was asked for such a rule for the soon to be installed cameras, they laughed and said both the police and the interior intelligence agency can and will request demonstrations to be filmed on a case by case basis and the people will not be told if the cameras are on or off.
Germany's federal police (BKA) and ministry of interior security ("Ministerium für Staatssicherheit") are unhappy with these fragmented and diversified solutions. They aim for a networked system that can find people nation wide on any camera using biometric recognition when a search warrant is issued.
In the meantime Deutsche Bahn is experimenting with a "facial anti-recognition feature" that replaces faces with fakes because they believe they can easier share the data with third party data anaylsis providers if they do that.
This comment will be downvoted, but this is hyperbole. Your everyday movements are more than just your activity in public spaces.
Likewise any website publishing your activity in public spaces is not entitled to linking it to your PII, because if they do deanonymize it, you now have means to take it down.
There are at least two issues, and both are worth discussing. Interestingly, if we prevent the surveillance problem we also prevent the racist surveillance problem, so in this way one could argue that (in this specific situation) the surveillance problem is more fundamental.
They're also ignoring classism - It's fine if the rights of the working class are violated, as long as they're all violated equally. Never-mind the people who can afford privacy on the free market.
I think wether you can trust your government to not misuse it (eg tracking minorities) is somewhat separate.
So crime just shifted there. If you install CCTV there it shifts somewhere else. That doesn't mean you're decreasing crime.
This is a report by the UK home office which finds that CCTV has little to none impact on overall crime rates: https://techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~iluetkeb/2006/surveillance...
Also, the evidence that CCTV is effective at deterring or solving crime is debatable. There is a plausible alternative theory that it simply moves the crime around. That is OK for you if you live and work in "nice" parts of town, but not so much if you are in the districts where the crime and antisocial behaviour get pushed to.
I suppose in theory, if you blanketed the entire country with CCTV (just one town is no good, the crime can move to the next town over) then you might have a deterrent effect, but of course all the other concerns about mass surveillance would still apply.
I'm curious - how does a wealthy person retain their privacy from this type of mass surveillance but the working class does not?
It's also possible that more affluent neighborhoods have fewer cameras.
Um Another way to view... Let us take a quick look at a utopian idea: 'Does the government guarants me, that gains come without additional costs ?' (-;
While all these regions are prone to racism, the experiential reality of racism between two places is not the same, and this article's seeming assumption that the racism of the U.S is directly translatable to these different EU cities is ridiculous.
Of course if someone uses an algorithm trained on the racism of the U.S in Prague they might get something that anyone viewing the reports would find really weird, so that might be an amusing thing to try.
In short the issue at hand is an issue apparently dreamed up by people not realizing that their society's problems are not exactly universal.
You make an excellent point about an algorithm being trained in the US being used in Prague. They might not be applicable since Czech Republic since training an algorithm in what is a few steps up from an apartheid state will of course be doped with the racial biases of that country.
Do you happen to know, is this the same thing or an earlier (non ML) version?
https://www.romfordrecorder.co.uk/news/facial-recognition-te...
USA has 1 camera for every 6 or 7 people?
Also, that link doesn’t seem to say whether cameras are owned by the state. Presumably surveillance operated by the government is more totalitarian than various private businesses.
The same NSA that has vacuumed up phone and internet data, including that of US citizens?