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
Right now the stores do not have personal information on the shoppers. Shoppers are tracked by IMEI number ( International Mobile Equipment Identity ). But I’m confident it will not be long before your mobile phone company finds a way to sell this information to interested parties. In phones with a sim card this information is on the sim, in phones without sims it is stored on the phone hardware.
See also:
Data retention effectively changes the behavior of citizens in Germany
Tags: artificial intelligence in the news
The SantaFe Trail is a textbook beginner’s problem in genetic programming. The ants are allowed to turn right or left or to move forward. Ants can see food if it is directly in front of them. The Trail is the one in the image above and it is also in the source code.
Ants follow two finite state machines, one if it sees food, another if it does not see food. Optimally the see food machine would only have move forward. But we let nature decide that.
Ants are created, given a random set of instructions and move one instruction each cycle. Then entire swarm moves a given number of cycles, then a new generation is born. The top half of the food finders in the generation mate. One mate contributes the ’see food’ states, one the ‘doesn’t see food states’ and one move is randomly changed in each string of moves. The population is kept at a constant number.
Source Code:
Santa Fe Ants ( Java )
Papers:
Cartesian Genetic Programming (pdf )
Selection in massively Parallel Genetic Algorithms
Ant Algorithms for Discrete Optimization
See also:
Evolutionary AI
Tags: source code
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
Tags: artificial intelligence in the news
