Citigraf was conceived in 2016, when the Chicago Police Department hired Genetec to solve a surveillance conundrum. Like other large law enforcement organizations around the country, the department had built up such an impressive arsenal of technologies for keeping tabs on citizens that it had reached the point of surveillance overload. To get a clear picture of an emergency in progress, officers often had to bushwhack through dozens of byzantine databases and feeds from far-flung sensors, including gunshot detectors, license plate readers, and public and private security cameras. This process of braiding together strands of information—“multi-intelligence fusion” is the technical term—was becoming too difficult. As one Chicago official put it, echoing a well-worn aphorism in surveillance circles, the city was “data-rich but information-poor.” What investigators needed was a tool that could cut a clean line through the labyrinth. What they needed was automated fusion.
Tag: technology
IARPA Developing AI To Help Predict The Future
As far as secretive government projects go, the objectives of IARPA may be the riskiest and most far-reaching. With its mission to foster “high-risk, high-payoff” programs, this research arm of the U.S. intelligence community literally tries to predict the future. Staffed by spies and Ph.D.s, this organization aims to provide decision makers with real, accurate predictions of geopolitical events, using artificial intelligence and human “forecasters.”
IARPA, which stands for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, was founded in 2006 as part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Some of the projects that it has funded focused on advancements in quantum computing, cryogenic computing, face recognition, universal language translators, and other initiatives that would fit well in a Hollywood action movie plot. But perhaps its main goal is to produce “anticipatory intelligence.” It’s a spy agency, after all.
In the interest of national security, IARPA wants to identify major world events before they happen, looking for terrorists, hackers or any perceived enemies of the United States. Wouldn’t you rather stop a crime before it happens?
Of course, that’s when we get into tricky political and sci-fi territory. Much of the research done by IARPA is actually out in the open, utilizing the public and experts in advancing technologies. It is available for “open solicitations,” forecasting tournaments, and has prize challenges for the public. You can pretty much send your idea in right now. But what happens to the R&D once it leaves the lab is, of course, often for only the NSA and the CIA to know.
Biden Takes Trump’s Wall to Next Level, New “Smart” Wall Will Spy on Americans Hundreds of Miles Inland
On January 20, in the minds of the establishment left, a new dawn was on the horizon with nothing but unicorns, a$15 minimum wage, and free health care and college for all. However, many on the left are already learning that their new messiah, Joseph R. Biden, is not that different from the right’s former messiah when it comes to wars, the police state, and immigration.
Though the right claims Biden is “going to open up the borders” so all the immigrants can rush in and “take our jobs and rape our children” that is not what will happen. For people outraged by Trump putting “kids in cages” as part of his crackdown on illegal immigration over the last four years, Joe Biden is not different, in fact when you read below to see what is unfolding, you will see that he is worse.
Remember, Biden was vice president during the Obama administration which aggressively deported more immigrants than Trump and who also put “kids in cages.” In fact, the photos used to first bring attention to kids in cages under Trump, were actually taken during Biden’s tenure as VP and the detention facilities were an Obama-era creation.
Sure, Biden used executive action to stop the construction of Trump’s silly wall that was easily scalable and could easily be circumvented. He also stopped new enrollments in the Migrant Protection Protocols program, which forced asylum seekers to wait in often-dangerous circumstances in Mexico for their US immigration hearings. However, this is little more than virtue signaling for which the media can have something to praise him. Behind the scenes, Biden and his advisers have something in the works that dwarfs Trump’s wall — a “virtual” or “smart” wall.
Biden’s new “Smart” wall will use advanced surveillance technology to patrol the border, presenting a danger to immigrants and citizens alike. According to a report in The Nation, while the full text of the immigration legislative proposal Biden sent to Congress has not been made public, a fact sheet distributed to reporters contains a section titled “Supplement existing border resources with technology and Infrastructure,” which calls for additional funding to, among other things, “enhance the ability to process asylum seekers” and “manage and secure the southern border between ports of entry that focuses on flexible solutions and technologies that expand the ability to detect illicit activity.”
The smart wall will not be as obvious and physically offensive as an actual wall, but aerial drones, infrared cameras, motion sensors, radar, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence is far more ominous than steel and bricks.
MIT Engineers Create Spinach That Act as Sensors and Wirelessly Send Emails. No Mention of Hacking or Other Risks.
All wireless and/or “Smart” technology is vulnerable to hacking (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and other significant mishaps (see 1, 2). Serious warnings about Internet of Things (IoT) technology’s high failure rate and enormous vulnerability to hackers have been ongoing for years. Last August, IBM warned about a security flaw in millions of IoT devices including “Smart” Meters and medical implants.
In December, President Trump signed IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020 to create standards and guidelines on the use and management of IoT devices by federal agencies.
Nevertheless, sensors that operate and transmit wirelessly are still being used and/or considered for critical tasks including sewage maintenance. Scientists at MIT have taken this even farther.
Spotify Wants to Eavesdrop on Your Life to Pick the Next Song to Play
Music streaming service Spotify has reportedly filed a patent for new personality tracking technology that analyzes a user’s emotional state and suggests music based on it. The patent, titled “Identification of taste attributes from an audio signal,” details constantly monitoring “speech content and background noise” to provide song suggestions.
Music Business Worldwide reports that in October 2020, Spotify filed a patent for personality tracking technology that could determine a user’s emotional state in order to suggest the perfect song for them to listen to.
The filing explained that behavioral variables such as a user’s mood, their favorite genre of music, or their demographic could all “correspond to different personality traits of a user.” Spotify suggested that this could be used to promote personalized content to users based on the personality traits it detected.
Now a new U.S. Spotify patent shows that the company wants to use the technology to analyze users even further by using speech recognition to determine their “emotional state, gender, age, or accent.” These attributes can then be used to recommend content.
The new patent is titled “Identification of taste attributes from an audio signal” and was filed in February 2018 and granted on January 12, 2021. The patent can be read in full here.
Scientists propose putting nanobots in our bodies to create ‘global superbrain’
A team has proposed using nanobots to create the ‘internet of thoughts’, where instant knowledge could be downloaded just by thinking it.
An international team of scientists led by members of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence (AI) and computation will lead this century to the development of a human ‘brain-cloud interface’ (B-CI).
Writing in Frontiers in Neuroscience, the team said that a B-CI would connect neurons and synapses in the brain to vast cloud computing networks in real time.
Such a concept isn’t new with writers of science fiction, including Ray Kurzweil, who proposed it decades ago. In fact, Facebook has even admitted it is working on a B-CI.
However, Kurzweil’s fantasy about neural nanobots capable of hooking us directly into the web is now being turned into reality by the senior author of this latest study, Robert Freitas Jr.
Hmm…
World’s First ‘Living Robot’ Invites New Opportunities And Risks
A team of researchers from the University of Vermont and Tufts University has succeeded in developing robots composed exclusively of living biological cells. Dubbed “xenobots,” these living robots can perform a range of basic functions, from locomotion and object manipulation to collective behavior. Their creation promises to deliver significant advances in biology and in medicine, in particular. However, it also potentially carries serious risks, insofar as the researchers themselves admit that experimenting with living cells creates the scope for unforeseen consequences.
Putting such risks aside for one moment, the team’s development of “xenobots” is impressive. First, the scientists at Vermont simulated possible configurations of individual biological cells on a supercomputer. They used what’s called an evolutionary algorithm to test thousands of possibilities and find the best candidates, ‘best’ in terms of the known biophysics of biological cells, which in this case were frog cells.
BWI Airport Embraces LiDAR To Enforce Social Distancing
Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) has welcomed in the new year with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology informing travelers at one security checkpoint whether they’re properly social distancing, according to Airport World.
The LiDAR technology measures travelers’ movements with laser sensors, including the number of people waiting in line. Automated tracking software firm CrowdVision installed the new sophisticated technology at Security Checkpoint B of BWI.
The system notifies travelers on a giant screen whether social distancing is satisfactory. If lines at the security checkpoint are too dense, the system will encourage those waiting in line to practice more social distancing.
“Safe, healthy travel remains our priority,” said BWI’s executive director, Ricky Smith.
“Since the outset of the pandemic, BWI Marshall Airport has implemented many measures to help protect passengers and employees. This innovation provides real-time data on passenger flow so we can notify travelers and manage separation,” Smith said.
Among other global airports, BWI could be one of the first to embrace LiDAR technology to enforce social distancing.
MICROSOFT PATENT SHOWS PLANS TO REVIVE DEAD LOVED ONES AS CHATBOTS
Microsoft has been granted a patent that would allow the company to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people.
The patent describes creating a bot based on the “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages”, and more personal information.
“The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc”, it goes on to say.
“The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training the chat bot,” Microsoft also describes – implying that living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death.
Hellbound and Down 
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