[This has been cross-posted at Security Director News's Industry View]
The June 23 New Yorker has an interesting article (not available online) about efforts to make computers understand people and attain emotional intelligence. These efforts have been ongoing for decades, and challenges like regional speech patterns remain.
A company called Sound Intelligence founded in 2000 to focus on speech-noise separation also did analysis of non-speech sounds. By 2003 they had were working with the Dutch railway authority to detect glass-breaking, graffiti-spraying, and aggressive-speech sounds.
The Dutch city of Groningen now has an aggression detector installed at a busy intersection in an area full of pubs.
Elevated microphones spaced thirty meters apart run along both sides of the street, joining an existing network of cameras. These connect to a computer at at the police station in Groningen. If the system hears certain sound patterns that correspond with aggression, it sends an alert to the police station, where the police can assess the situation by examining closed-circuit monitors: if necessary, officers are dispatched to the scene...The system is promising because it does not pretend to be more intelligent than it is. I thought the problem with the technology would be false positives — too many loud noises that the machine mistook for aggression. But in Groningen at least, the problem has been just the opposite. "Groningen is the safest city in Holland," [one of the systems designers] said, ruefully. "There is virtuslly no crime. We don't have enough crime to train the system properly."
The system is also installed in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Coventry, and is being tested in London and Manchester.
- Abigail
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