Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Path Intelligence has developed software to track pedestrians by analyzing their mobile phone signals. Monitoring units can be placed about a mall or store and the units fetch a unique signal from shoppers phones and track the shopper’s path.

Stores are provided with easy to use interfaces for the data, weather information, and SMS notification of trouble ( people in unauthorized areas or left packages ) to security personal.

Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands.

The surveillance mechanism works by monitoring the signals produced by mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation – measuring the phone’s distance from three receivers.
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It has already been installed in two shopping centres, including Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, and three more centres will begin using it next month, Times Online has learnt. [ read more

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While most of the artificial intelligent design of websites has come in the form of ‘Mechanical Turks’ better known as Web 2.0. Here is someone using an evolution algorithm to design a website.

Matthew Hockenberry and Ernesto Arroyo of Creative Synthesis, a non-profit organisation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have created evolutionary software that alters colours, fonts and hyperlinks of pages in response to what seems to grab the attention of the people who click on the site. See Creative Synthesis for more. [ read more Web pages come alive and start breeding]

They defined the design of a webpage as a search problem. Then they broke html and css elements up into the smallest possible items. Those items are the dna, the webpage is the environment.

The best design attracts the most and longest attention. Here is the end result and some of the designs along the way AAAI.jpg

Human Tended Gardens of Evolutionary Design

Of all the companies watching me I can’t imagine one that thrills me less than Comcast. They have already been filtering and throttling our net traffic. Not content with collecting your packets they now plan to watch you in your living room. All for your own benefit of course.

If you have some tinfoil handy, now might be a good time to fashion a hat. At the Digital Living Room conference today, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room.

The idea being that if you turn on your cable box, it recognizes you and pulls up shows already in your profile or makes recommendations. If parents are watching TV with their children, for example, parental controls could appear to block certain content from appearing on the screen. Kunkel also said this type of monitoring is the “holy grail” because it could help serve up specifically tailored ads. Yikes. . . . [read more Comcast cameras to start watching you?
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ATT Big brother or savior?