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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Why is this AI? License plate scanning technology has been around for decades. Toll booths use them everywhere.

>License plate scanning technology has been around for decades.

While this is true, the big optical character recognition breakthrough was Yann LeCun's use of Convolutional Neural Networks in the 1990s, which I think most people put in the definitions for "ML" and "AI." But of course, as John McCarthy said: "as soon as it works, no one calls it ai anymore"

For starters, you need to determine which cars are actually parked, and if that spot is violating the rules. For fixed cameras generally the installation process just marks as spot or lane where every car "counts", but a camera on a moving bus needs to do that on its own.

couldn’t that be done off-line? The active system would just collect the data, plate number, GPS, etc., and the off-line system would process it with a overlay of the city map, etc.

Quoting the official claims from the article, "Only when the system observes a vehicle parked illegally in a bus lane or a bus stop does it record the license plate and capture video of the event." - it seems very reasonable from both practical and privacy standpoint that all that data should not be collected unless there's some reason to believe (e.g. by such an "AI" system) that there likely is an actual violation.

AI is the new marketing buzzword. Got to label everything as AI.

If you think about, AI are just linear regressions on steroids. So we could start selling graphing calculators as having AI even.

And what are movies except for coordinated, flashing lights and a paper cone being shaken real fast?

Who knows, although the main idea is that there are now cameras on the busses recording 24/7 looking for violations and emailing them to the local police department.

Scanning a licence plate is one thing, working out if a car is parked illegally is another, right?

That's being done in Rotterdam for ages. Cars with cameras on top which determine which cars have a parking violation. I think they check illegally parked cars plus cars which didn't pay. It's anything but new technology.

"AI" is not a synonym for "cutting edge less than a year old technology", the fact that this sort of AI has existed for years doesn't change the fact that it is a form of AI nor the fact that this specific city had decided to start to use it now.

Because it's trendy, obviously.

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