Revealed: a California city is training AI to spot homeless encampments
By Todd Feathers,
The Guardian
| 03. 25. 2024
For the last several months, a city at the heart of Silicon Valley has been training artificial intelligence to recognize tents and cars with people living inside in what experts believe is the first experiment of its kind in the United States. Last July, San Jose issued an open invitation to technology companies to mount cameras on a municipal vehicle that began periodically driving through the city’s district 10 in December, collecting footage of the streets and public spaces. The images are fed into computer vision software and used to train the companies’ algorithms to detect the unwanted objects, according to interviews and documents the Guardian obtained through public records requests.
Some of the capabilities the pilot project is pursuing – such as identifying potholes and cars parked in bus lanes – are already in place in other cities. But San Jose’s foray into automated surveillance of homelessness is the first of its kind in the country, according to city officials and national housing advocates. Local outreach workers, who were previously not aware of the experiment, worry the technology will...
Related Articles
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian | 05.14.2024
Photo by Kind and Curious from Unsplash
When Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) published the results of its gene therapy trial for “bubble baby” syndrome it was hailed as a medical breakthrough. The treatment had a more than 95% success...
By Victoria Bisset and Adela Suliman, The Washington Post | 05.09.2024
Photo by CDC from Unsplash
A baby girl born with profound genetic deafness can now hear unaided after receiving a “groundbreaking” gene therapy trial, Britain’s National Health Service said Thursday.
Opal Sandy, an 18-month-old from Oxfordshire, England, is the first...
By Carrie Arnold, Nature Biotechnology | 04.17.2024
Tome Biosciences came out of stealth mode on 12 December with a haul of over $200 million to develop the company’s gene editing platform. Tome’s first order of business was to snap up Replace Therapeutics to expand its toolkit to...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 04.24.2024
Lisa Pisano was lying in a hospital bed at NYU Langone Health, hooked up to beeping monitors and an array of tubes. Her surgical wounds were still healing, and she looked tired. But the 54-year-old New Jersey woman said she...