A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/22/in_brief_ai/

by Bender • 5 years ago

372 204 5 years ago

theregister.com

the-dude2• 5 years ago

This is about ShotSpotter.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ShotSpotter

PragmaticPulp2• 5 years ago

The article says that employees of the AI company (ShotSpotter) manually reviewed and classified the sounds as gunshots:

records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera.

So the AI didn’t even make the call. The staff did, manually. I assume that means the actual audio is available and entered into evidence?

If humans are making the call then blaming AI seems like a stretch. That’s almost like blaming the motion detection algorithms for triggering video recordings that were later reviewed by humans. It’s still humans reviewing the recordings and making decisions.

jtbayly2• 5 years ago

It may not be right to blame AI, but it's certainly the case that they were presenting it as "the system says there was a shot fired here." The bigger point is that the "system" can't be trusted. And the fact that they need to manually classify things is proof of that fact. (It's way more complicated than just an audio recording. It's recordings from numerous locations, attempting to triangulate the original location, without being confused by echoes and other things.)

PragmaticPulp2• 5 years ago

It may not be right to blame AI, but it's certainly the case that they were presenting it as "the system says there was a shot fired here."

I think a crucial distinction is to clarify who “they” is: Who was making the claim? From the article, it seems that the prosecutors may have been the ones exaggerating the evidence:

Prosecutors said ShotSpotter picked up a gunshot sound where Williams was seen on surveillance camera footage in his car, putting it all forward as proof that Williams shot Herring right there and then.

Naturally the defense wanted to see the actual evidence, so that’s what they got down to.

I know everyone wants to vilify AI, but I think the actual bad actor in this article might be the prosecutor trying to misrepresent the evidence.

stefan_• 5 years ago

That's the point? These systems invariably turn out to not be any sort of AI at all, but sales people ready to make a call any way their customer (police) wants it made.

Later it's presented as AI to a jury. It's basically the same scam as lots of forensics, junk science to get a desired result.

giantg215• 5 years ago

I generally agree, but wouldn't necessarily say a lot of forensics is junk science. The science is generally sound (procedures and theory). Usually it's the prosecutors that present the forensics in a way that misrepresents what the results actually mean. Or lab techs make mistakes or perform misconduct (How to Fix a Drug Scandal on Netflix is interesting).

sdenton43• 5 years ago

Most forensic science is junk.

That said, human in the loop ML can be extremely useful. Surfacing possible positive examples for human review and/or cutting down 'obvious' negatives can multiply the productivity of human reviewers in many contexts.

jdjd64• 5 years ago

It really boggles my mind how desperate people are to try and include and blame the police for everything.

sales people ready to make a call any way their customer (police) wants it made.

You really believe people signed up for a dangerous amd thankless job with high liability and low pay so they can feverishly conspire to have this guy arrested?

Edit: This place is becoming reddit. Someone posting links which dont substantiate their statements gets upvoted, meanwhile my replies questioning this get hit by a downvote brigade.

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

What freaks me out about forensics is no one at all is doing any validation testing. And they aren't doing blind testing either.

robocat• 5 years ago

Police are telling ShotSpotter to alter evidence from gunshot-detecting AI

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xbq/police-are-telling-sh...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27959755

helsinkiandrew• 5 years ago

It's scary that prosecutors thought that the ShotSpotter evidence is suitable for a court. It's amazing technology that can help police get to a crime scene quickly but is far too easy to spoof or get the wrong answer due to reflections and other sounds etc.

Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court.

SamoyedFurFluff• 5 years ago

I mean, drug dogs are still a thing even though we know they tend to respond to owners desires regardless of if there’s drugs present.

DaftDank3• 5 years ago

I started reading "Amazon Unbound" by Brad Stone, and in the part where he discusses the development of Alexa, my laymen self had never considered how difficult it would be to train that thing. I think the term was "far-field" speech recognition, and all the problems that come up when adding in real world variables. People talking from across the room while others are talking, or the TV is going, or as you said, reflections and other materials in the room.

I agree that it is disturbing they tried to use this as evidence.

smt88• 5 years ago

The only people saying ShotSpotter is amazing technology are ShotSpotter's PR team.

By all other accounts, it doesn't work at all and is losing contracts.

"...a study of Chicago police data found that over a nearly 22-month period ending in mid-April, almost 90% of ShotSpotter alerts didn’t result in officers reporting evidence of shots fired or of any gun crime."[1]
"In four years, police have made two arrests while responding to a ShotSpotter activation. Lt. Shawn Takeuchi, an SDPD spokesman, could only confirm that one of those arrests was directly related to the activation, but declined to give more information on both."[2]

1. https://apnews.com/article/chicago-police-crime-shootings-be...

2. https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/shotspo...

tyingq2• 5 years ago

Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court.

I don't see any incentive here. The only consequence suffered by the prosecution was having to drop that evidence. That's it. Maybe there's a civil case later, but that will be separated by a large time gap, etc.

giantg215• 5 years ago

"Hopefully cases like this will eventually stop the system being used in court."

Maybe it will stop this system from being used in court, but new ones will take its place. It would be great if we could change the structure of the justice system to prevent these types of issues from popping up again. I have no idea what a solution would look like.

mbg721• 5 years ago

My personal theory has long been that "technology" is the word people use for things that don't reliably work. It's never clean drinking water from the tap or the seed drill, it's stuff like this or clunky meeting software.

tmpz22• 5 years ago

It's amazing technology

Serious question, what part of this technology is amazing? Its just sounds trained against audio labeled as gun shots. How is this any different then detecting faces in images or whatever?

nerdponx• 5 years ago

Crucially, Williams' lawyers – public defenders Lisa Boughton and Brendan Max – said records showed that ShotSpotter actually initially picked up what sounded like a firework a mile away, and this was later reclassified by ShotSpotter staff to be a gunshot at the intersection where and when Williams was seen on camera. ShotSpotter strongly insisted it had not improperly altered any data to favor the police's case, and said that regardless of the initial real-time alert, its evidence of the gunshot was the result of follow-up forensic analysis, which was submitted to the courts.

"Strongly insisted" links to: https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/02/nvidia_cuda_openai/

One of the pieces of evidence against Williams claims ShotSpotter's sensors in Chicago identified gunfire where surveillance cameras had seen Williams stop his car by a south-side Chicago block, right when and where the cops said Herring was shot.
However, Williams’ lawyer submitted paperwork [PDF] claiming ShotSpotter actually detected a firework a mile away from that location, and that ShotSpotter later reclassified the bang as a gunshot and the location as being where Williams was seen on camera, Vice first reported.
Williams' lawyer demanded the court hold an inquiry into the ShotSpotter evidence, and the prosecutors simply withdrew it.
ShotSpotter responded by denying at length it improperly altered any data or evidence, and hit back at any suggestion it had done so to help the police make a case. It said its software generates real-time alerts automatically, and staff later analyze the microphone readings to submit forensic reports for the courts, and these final reports can therefore differ from the initial alerts.
"The idea that ShotSpotter 'alters' or 'fabricates' evidence in any way is an outrageous lie and would be a criminal offense," it said in a statement. "We follow the facts and data for our forensic analysis. Period."
Update: The case against Williams was dismissed by the judge at the request of the prosecution, which admitted it now had insufficient evidence. Williams had spent the best part of a year in jail awaiting trial.

merrywhether• 5 years ago

Wow, we need a civil rights lawyer to represent Williams in a wrongful imprisonment suit against the city, if not also a civil suit against ShotSpotter (or maybe even a criminal complaint for knowingly providing false testimony?). People shouldn’t be able to just dust their hands of this.

coldtea• 5 years ago

So the AI didn’t even make the call. The staff did, manually.

(a) The staff of the company who makes the AI, which would have an incentive to make the AI's original judgement appear accurate?

(b) The staff of a company paid by the state/police, which aims to please its customers?

(c) Was the staff trained/experts in recognizing such sounds, or were they random AI company employees, which just made a judgement call? If so, was this call presented as AI-supported to the trial, and was it sold as anything beyond "some devs, no gun experts, mind you, heard this recording and said this must be a gunshot".

dylan6045• 5 years ago

It could come at the behest of police as in "it would be really helpful to our case if there was ShotSpotter evidence to support our cased". It could come from the fact that ShotSpotter is losing customers, and willing to do anything to make the product "feel" more valuable to the police to ensure cash cows keep producing.

The modern criminal investigation has so much negative baggage attached, from historical shenianigans, that it's easy to find ways to question the prosecution's case.

emodendroket9• 5 years ago

If manual reclassification is routine then what does that say about the AI?

CrazyStat2• 5 years ago

That it doesn't give the answers the customers (police and prosecutors) want.

Which is mostly unrelated to whether or not it's accurate.

kbenson• 5 years ago

There was a submission here a few weeks back about ShitSpotter and how they seem willing to put in overrides at request of the police without necessarily having a basis for it.

If that's what happened in this circumstances it would be, police check ShoySpotter for more evidence, ShotSpotter hasn't automatically marked anything, police request manual review for gunshot they are sure must be there, ShotSpotter manual review process comes up with something and marks it as a shot with a human override.

There's a lot of places bias, or outright corruption, could cause problems in that process, if it's what happened here.

mola• 5 years ago

It's the AI companies to blame, always. Obviously the algorithm is without blame, it's not a blamelable entity.

FireBeyond3• 5 years ago

What almost invariably happens in cases like this or the cell phone surveillance boxes (Stingrays) is that if the underlying technology or behavior is challenged or questioned strongly enough, the evidence introduced by them, if not the case itself, will be withdrawn, in order to try to avoid any negative precedent against the device or technology being set.

chacham15• 5 years ago

This is missing a key crucial insight: the overall number of evaluated cases increases when AI is helping meaning that borderline cases which may have been ignored prior are now being evaluated. Said another way, with AI handling the obvious cases, the number of borderline cases being evaluated by humans increases. With humans having large amounts of inaccuracy, borderline cases before which may have been ignored due to not having manpower to evaluate are now being evaluated. This can and does lead to many more erroneous accusations despite the fact that all the borderline evaluations are being handled by humans.

Another factor here is that simply evaluating more data is also likely to lead to more erroneous evaluations since random chance has a much larger impact.

smsm42• 5 years ago

But this is so convenient! "Your honor, this is the AI algorithm that said it was a gunshot, AI can't lie and is based on pure Science!" Yeah, later it turns out people made that decision because police asked them to do it, but the defense may not know it.

jrochkind1• 5 years ago

It sounds like they reclassified it after the police said "Gee, are you sure you don't have a gunshot? in a slightly different location?"

I wonder how much of "AI" introduced in court (or for a warrant) involves some element of individual human attention though... They just call it "AI" without qualification until they get caught (if even then).

Would it be better though if it had been purely the output of a machine learning algorithm? (Which after all is not infallible). In that case, the guy probably would have been convicted on that alone...

yawaworht19782• 5 years ago

Well that's still a failure on both the software programmed by humans causing a false positive and then doubled down by a wrong human review, based on a false alert. All involved stakeholders have failed.

nend• 5 years ago

How is this a failure by software? The software categorized the sound as a fire work.

indymike• 5 years ago

How is this a failure by software?

The outcome - a guy being charged with a crime using bogus evidence is the story. The software may have been right, but the people who operate the software didn't trust it. Regardless, the story is trying to point out we might not be ready to put our faith in AI for criminal prosecutions at this time.

notahacker• 5 years ago

Yeah, looks like it's the actual software that's undermined the case against him. A loud bang which coincides - perhaps pretty loosely - with some footage, some supposed audio expert contractor's human employee - possibly knowing other details of the case - thinks it's consistent with a gunshot but the case collapses when records reveal the AI program they ran originally classified the loud bang as a distant firework.

ClumsyPilot3• 5 years ago

'The system' is software + people who run it. Their failures are combined. As an external person i dont care which part of the company fucked up, they shoupd carry responsibility

alias_neo• 5 years ago

The software didn't raise a false positive though, by my reading.

It identified it as a firework a mile away! The humans at the software company, REclassified it as a gunshot at Williams' location.

Interesting that there's no mention of the actual gun shot, which appears to have happened some time later?

Not only is this "tool" bullshit, it seems the employees of said org are morally bankrupt enough to falsify evidence in order to put an innocent man in jail.

The whole thing would be utterly unbelievable if it wasn't happening in America.

EDIT: typos

tyingq2• 5 years ago

It's interesting to me that there's no working process to introduce/accept new types of science in court. Polygraphs aren't allowed (though the police still find ways to use it to bully people). So, there's some process. But you still see stories about subsets of fiber, hair, arson, fingerprint, dna, etc, science, that shouldn't have been brought to court.

jes• 5 years ago

The legal system will, over time, also have to accept and adapt to the idea that free will is an illusion. (See “neuro-law” for more information on this.)

matt123456789• 5 years ago

Unless you are aware of any breakthroughs in fundamental physics or neurology which are being kept from the rest of us, “free will is an illusion” is not a very useful theory when it comes to public policy.

amanaplanacanal• 5 years ago

The idea that the people who run the legal system have the free will to change it is also an illusion.

abrichr• 5 years ago

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurolaw

The rapid growth of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research has led to new insights on neuroanatomical structure and function, which has led to a greater understanding of human behavior and cognition. As a response, there has been an emergence of questions regarding how these findings can be applied to criminology and legal processes.

I hope they have a more solid foundation of evidence than fMRI.

Eg from https://www.fastcompany.com/90520750/duke-university-researc... :

The researchers reexamined 56 peer-reviewed, published papers that conducted 90 fMRI experiments, some by leaders in the field, and also looked at the results of so-called “test/retest” fMRIs, where 65 subjects were asked to do the same tasks months apart. They found that of seven measures of brain function, none had consistent readings.

Also https://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900 :

Functional MRI (fMRI) is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data. Here, we used resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy controls to conduct 3 million task group analyses. Using this null data with different experimental designs, we estimate the incidence of significant results. In theory, we should find 5% false positives (for a significance threshold of 5%), but instead we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of a number of fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of weakly significant neuroimaging results.

oh_sigh• 5 years ago

Why would it? Aren't judges and legislators equally lacking in free will too?

Crontab• 5 years ago

Coming next year: "A man spent a year in jail on child pornography charge that hinged on disputed Apple CSAM evidence".

csydas• 5 years ago

I know you're being coy to slam on Apple, but this already happens in the uS __without__ Apple's (imo misguided) strategy and it happens frequently.

Prosecution over thumbnails, file hash matches with tenuous connections to individuals, Crime-Tech has given a new position for law enforcement to craft fanciful narratives to support prosecutions of just about anyone. I'm not specifically citing or inferring there have been *targeted* instances of this, but it happens very often towards US citizens already.

Stingrays, Cellebrite, Forensic "science", ShotSpotter, it's absolute chaos and anyone can be a victim here.

My goal here is not anything about Apple and its CSAM strategy, but to make it very clear that the imagined scenario happens now and happens frequently.

ailef• 5 years ago

I'd be interested in reading about some of these real cases if you have any links handy.

scoopertrooper3• 5 years ago

For that to happen: they'd have to be matched 30 times, the Apple employees would have to mistakenly manually confirm the match 30 times, and the defence would fail to request to see the underlying images that matched the hashes during discovery.

It seems... far fetched.

the-dude2• 5 years ago

For now.

xdennis• 5 years ago

You don't know it's 30 and you don't know it's going to stay so even if it is.

NoPicklez• 5 years ago

You might be surprised to know that many other major tech companies have already been using the same CSAM technology for the last two years and how many of these situations have you heard of? I can't think of any.

JackFr2• 5 years ago

“It's said that in May last year, Williams was driving through Chicago one night hoping to buy some cigarettes.”

Ah yes, I remember hearing that a lot growing up.

Editors, do your job!

jwilk• 5 years ago

What do you mean?

meowster2• 5 years ago

I think OP meant that "driving through Chicago" was pretty large/vague area for someone just trying to buy cigarettes.

It's like saying I was driving through the United States to go to my local corner store.

I wouldn't have thought about the poor writing if OP didn't mention it, but it is still a bit pedantic in my opinion.

LeonB• 5 years ago

“It’s said” — by whom?

aaaaaaaaaaab• 5 years ago

Weasel words: “it’s said”

JackFr2• 5 years ago

The sentence I quoted makes no sense in a news article.

- The use of the passive “It’s said” has no business in a news item. Who said it?

- Idiomatically “It’s said” is typically used to identify a bit of folk wisdom, not a particular incident.

It’s terrible writing and it should appall a decent editor. This isn’t a blog post or a comment, it’s an item in an English language professional online publication. Do better.

tluyben2• 5 years ago

Not really relevant to this article, but relevant to the title: if AI keeps banning accounts for reasons that seems nonsense to humans, how will we protect people from getting flagged and locked up 'just in case' by the machine?

AI is just not advanced enough to jail people, by a very large margin. And yet we will see it happen.

MeinBlutIstBlau5• 5 years ago

The scariest part is how quickly policing agencies are to embrace this tech as well but the government as a whole is slow to change anything else. Why is it that the state can be proactive about jailing me but not as much when it comes to quickly resolving cases and protecting my rights?

rvba• 5 years ago

Wow there are microphones used to detect gunshots in Chicago? I remember seeing such technology in a relatively obscure cyberpunk comic book when I was a kid, but I never thought this would be legal.

Do the microphones record conversations too? Can the government spy on its own citizens? I guess some secret court ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intell... ) allowed it?

bleachedsleet• 5 years ago

Oh boy, wait until you learn it’s not just Chicago where they deploy this crap [1]

[1] https://www.shotspotter.com/cities/

LinuxBender• 5 years ago

There are LED street lights in San Diego California that do just that. They have cameras and microphones. The microphones are used for Machine Learning of what people say. [1] There are a handful of other cities deploying these. It is a clever way to deploy CCTV much like what the UK has but without drawing much attention to it.

[1] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/san-diego-faces-lawsuit...

leephillips4• 5 years ago

This year in jail was awaiting the “speedy trial” that is supposed to be guaranteed by the US Constitution. I think that in itself is as much of an issue as the quality of the evidence. How can the government justify taking year away from the life of a man who has not been convicted of anything?

stelcodes2• 5 years ago

A year? Curtis Flowers spent over 20 years on Death Row without being convicted of anything. A couple years ago he was set free! Why? Because of a true crime podcast called In The Dark. Seriously. Listen to season 2 and your mind will be blown. The “justice” system in this country is horrific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Flowers?wprov=sfti1

leephillips4• 5 years ago

I agree with your distress at the state of the justice system, but it doesn’t make sense to say that someone was on death row without having been convicted. The article you link to explains that his convictions were overturned. Although I would never rely on information in a Wikipedia article, you did link to it, so presumably you find it credible.

R0b0t12• 5 years ago

It's typical for a defendant to waive their right to a speedy trial. If you don't waive it typically you get the book thrown at you and in the little time you have to prepare, something sticks. I agree this should be changed but there is not much political will behind it, as prosecutors view it as a necessity to try everyone fairly. The real solution is to not bring so many pointless cases to trial.

Knowing that, I think I would demand a speedy trial, but most people have horrible lawyers.

leephillips4• 5 years ago

Huh, thanks for pointing that out. I had no idea that waiving the right to a speedy trial was even a thing. If you do not so waive, what is the standard for a trial date that is considered constitutionally speedy at the moment?

x86_64Ubuntu• 5 years ago

A lot of times, people have to waive their right to a speedy trial. Apparently, in some districts they don't like it when the accused doesn't waive their right, so much that the defense attorney will get assaulted by the judge.

https://youtu.be/jAv1QUkHFSY?t=397

ransom15382• 5 years ago

This. "Michael Williams, 65, who denied any wrongdoing, sat in jail for 11 months awaiting trial for allegedly killing Safarian Herring, 25."

Do not waive a speedy trial ever. The judge will want you to, your attorney will want you to ($), the DA will want you to. Tell them to go fuck themselves.

shadilay2• 5 years ago

'Florida Judge'

tomxor• 5 years ago

“I kept trying to figure out, how can they get away with using the technology like that against me,”

I have a bad feeling this will be a theme over the next decade as government and law enforcement around the world starts to integrate "AI" (or rather call it what it is: statistical models + mass surveilence), without enough scepticism built into their process. Some of us know better, but it looks like society and government will still have to learn the hard way that these tools are not a highlight pen, they are a very crude spray can, and even then they will miss spots.

LatteLazy• 5 years ago

This seems like the definition of circumstantial evidence doesn't it? AI, human, accourate or not, he shouldn't have been in jail without something more.

emodendroket9• 5 years ago

I’m not a Luddite by any means but it is time to be more honest about the limitations of AI.

MeinBlutIstBlau5• 5 years ago

The only time I hear about people who talk about AI are average joes, ignorant journalists, generic business analysts, and upper management that don't know anything about programming. I wish I could point to these people and say "look at video game AI, we can't even make those without it cheating or following a routine to simulate human playstyles. What makes you think we can do that in real life without doing the same?"

emodendroket9• 5 years ago

Video games are a bad example because it’s pretty feasible to make an AI that would win every time.

setr• 5 years ago

It seems to me jail time without verdict is the real problem in this scenario — it’s not clear to me how that’s not “guilty until proven innocent”

DubiousPusher2• 5 years ago

Precisely. This happens to people all the time regardless of the technology involved. Being suspected of a crime should never ruin your life. At most it should pause your life.

House arrest with deferral of your debts and obligations and mandatory reinstatement of your job if you are exhonorated or the charges are removed seems like what you would need at a minimum to live up to "innocent until found guilty".

qayxc• 5 years ago

That's exactly what judges decide to do if certain criteria are met, though.

The person in this case, however, had a criminal history including attempted homicide so the judge decided to opt for detention while awaiting trial instead.

Sounds like perfectly normal procedure to me and happens other countries as well.

MeinBlutIstBlau5• 5 years ago

In Germany and Austria you get compensated for your time incarcerated if found innocent. So as to basically "fine" the government for not having speedy trials.

bagacrap• 5 years ago

that sounds fair except not great that it's just penalizing the taxpayer, not anyone in government

StreamBright• 5 years ago

The US has the most troublesome track record of law enforcement abuse of "evidence".

https://innocenceproject.org/what-is-bite-mark-evidence-fore...

https://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/nathan-robinson-forensi...

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/ke...

Borrible• 5 years ago

Fake AI?

Who would have thought?

Shocking, shocking I tell you.

https://venturebeat.com/2021/04/05/government-audit-of-ai-wi...

siliconc0w• 5 years ago

Wow - any software system that is used to submit evidence to the court should have a preferably cryptographically secure chain of custody of all artifacts - including the raw recorded audio and the code used to process it. Any manual 'post processing' should be tracked down to a person, a date, and a verifiable reason for making changes to the model/decision. For 'black box' models an independent organization should be able to test them to confirm stated accuracy/precision.

I don't think the answer is to do away with these systems but as we yield more and more authority to machines regulation will need to catch up so they aren't just used a fig leaf for corroboratory-evidence-as-a-service.

bryan03• 5 years ago

Soon after another vehicle pulled up alongside, and someone in a passenger seat took out a gun and shot Herring in the head, Williams told police.

I dont understand what Shotspotter has to do with this case at all. The question the case seems to hinge on is “who fired the gun”, not “was a gun fired at this location”.

What am I missing?

dylan6045• 5 years ago

What am I missing?

The fact that some of the evidence the police used to say who did what where was manufactured by the company.

bryan03• 5 years ago

The headline is:

A man spent a year in jail on a murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence.

But after the reading the article, the evidence seemed irrelevant?

Maybe the headline should have been:

AI evidence was manually reclassified after human review in murder case

arthur_sav• 5 years ago

Anyone else surprised that such a system is running across cities?

kevin_thibedeau2• 5 years ago

I get that their system may sometimes need manual classification of signals but how is it possible to change the triangulated location? That is the core part of the technology and doesn't require ML to implement. Seems like it's all just Theranos style vapor.

c_weighted2• 5 years ago

Locating on an echo at one more receivers rather than a perhaps quieter more direct path. Putting the wrong impulses together when computing a location. Computing the wrong start time for one or more impulses.

If you want to read up on all the ways this kind of thing can go wrong, the technical term here is "source localization."

kevin_thibedeau2• 5 years ago

The military has no problem detecting gunfire direction and estimating range from a single microphone array on a mast. Shotspotter is a distributed network of multiple sensors across a wide area. If they can't make it work after 15+ years then they are hopeless.

backtoyoujim• 5 years ago

“The problem? When we made it possible for anyone to generate art with artificial intelligence, barely anyone used it to make actual art. Instead, our AI model was forced to make videos for random inputs, trolling queries, and NSFW intents.”

I am struggling with the use of the word "forced"; the researchers put their software out there to be used by anyone with an internet connection. The researchers created that dynamic.

And how are they not seeing that AI created no-humans-used-to-make-this-porn could be a net good.

Vaslo• 5 years ago

We have this system in our city. Can’t speak to the accuracy and whether or not it should be admitted evidence. It has in some cases revealed the approximate locations of victims who have been shot where they potentially could have died without the AI heads up as to where they were.

TeeMassive• 5 years ago

Prosecution based on evidence provided by closed source and closed hardware based devices should never have been admitted in courts of laws in the first place.

A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence

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