Colleges become Big Brother in file-sharing crackdown
As the recording industry pressures college officials to clamp down on
music downloads from the Internet, privacy groups say campuses have to be
careful not to invade students' privacy. — Fox News
Big brother on campus
Private companies have not been the only players in TIA research. Dozens of
universities within and without the United States have also worked on the
program’s components for years.
Since late 2000, researchers at Georgia Tech have been working on a new
computer-based identification system called Human ID that theoretically can
take video images from a camera and distinguish people by the way that they
walk and their different mannerisms. The applications of this software
could have unlimited potential when used with satellite imaging, government
video, and even security cameras. The theory is that each person has
distinctive body movements and by recording and analyzing these movements,
the government could identify suspects even if they are wearing disguises
or have altered their appearances.
According to unclassified budget documents recently released by the Defense
Department, DARPA spent $11.8 million during the 2001 fiscal year to
develop a “pilot force protection system” for Human ID as well as create
prototype models and develop advanced sensors (p. 88.). DARPA’s new budget
increases the program’s spending to $30.1 million during the next two
fiscal years to identify the limitations of the range and accuracy of the
program while fusing multi-modal technologies to derive biometric signatures.
Overall, Georgia Tech has received four federal grants totaling $1.2
million for the “HumanID from movement” project, beginning in the last
quarter of 2000. The funds are part of a $50 million DARPA program to
identify people from a distance that encompasses 26 research projects
including two from Georgia Tech to analyze movement.
In addition to recognizing people by body movement, Human ID is working on
facial recognition and iris recognition software. These uses have been
tested on subjects at a distance of 25-150 feet, but future DARPA plans
anticipate distances as far as 500 feet.
“I do computer vision research,” said Aaron Bobick, an associate professor
at Georgia Tech researching HumanID for DARPA. “Part of it is to see how to
get computers to see things. One of things that I am working on is
understanding motion and recognizing people from a distance.”
Bobick told the Center that the research is still preliminary. “We’ve found
it to be successful in a limited number of cases but gait recognition is
really in its infancy. We don’t know how successful it will be. We are
still at the point where we don’t know what will be possible.”
DARPA projects on identification go well beyond “naked eye” visual
appearance. The defense agency is currently trying to identify potential
suspects by their unseen traits using plumes of odorant molecules. While
doing experiments on subjects as small as moths, bacteria and mammals,
scientists are finding new ways of differentiating small particles to
understand identity.
DARPA has spent more than $427,000 on four grants to the University of
Arizona dating back to 1998 to study this identification method called
“biologically-inspired search algorithms for locating unseen odor sources.”
Like gait recognition, the smell test is still in development.
Research associate Ben Coates, database editor Aron Pilhofer, and executive
director Charles Lewis contributed to this report. To write a letter to the
editor for publication, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please include
a daytime phone number.
http://www.public-i.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=484&L1=10&L2=10&L3=0&L4=0&L5=0
