The internet is a strange and wonderful place sometimes because without it, how would we ever find out about people like this guy who built a remote-controllable wheel suit and took it out in Chinese rush-hour traffic?

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As you can see in the video, there are plenty of opportunities for this guy to get turned into roadkill by a truck or an absent-minded driver, but somehow the fun only ends when the cops show up and arrest him. (Read more from “Chinese Man Tests His Crazy Homemade Roller Suit in Rush-Hour Traffic” HERE)

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Predictive behavior technology is all the rage in everything from advertising to policing to medicine, and is something that we have covered extensively at Activist Post (see our archives here). Technocrats everywhere believe that the supreme being of the universe should be a computer algorithm; because, after all, in its perfection it knows us better than we know ourselves.

The following research from the University of Southern California is a chilling example of how the State could easily employ this technology for literal interventions where potential violence could occur. Beyond the micromanagement of adult relationships, note the final direction at the end of the article: parent-child relationships.

Are we really this lazy to turn over our most intimate interactions to the advice of a computer and hope that it can help manage our every emotion? Are we really that eager to completely eradicate human free will?

Mobile sensing system developed by joint USC Dornsife and USC Viterbi team could give couples the power to anticipate each other’s emotional states and adapt behavior

Your partner comes in and slams a door. What was that about? Something you did? What if you knew to anticipate it because you were notified in advance from an automated text message that he/she didn’t have a great day at work? Might that change the dynamic of your interactions?

You had a bad day. The last thing you need is to get into an argument when you get home because your partner also had a bad day. What if technology could automatically send you a notification advising you to do a short meditation module to restore your mental state? How might this affect the quality of your interactions with your partner?

In the near future, researchers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Dornsife College of Arts, Letters and Sciences believe technology might be employed to help de-escalate any potential conflicts among couples. In a collaboration between the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering and the Family Studies Project in the Psychology Department at USC Dornsife, researchers employed multi-modal ambulatory measures to develop a system in order to detect if conflict had occurred between a couple—a sort of seismometer of the shakes, rattles and rolls in a relationship.

The research, documented in “Using Multimodal Wearable Technology to Detect Conflict among Couples,” by Adela C. Timmons, Theodora Chaspari, Sohyun C. Han, Laura Perrone, Shrikanth S. Narayanan, and Gayla Margolin, is published by the IEEE Computer Society this month.

In order to detect intra-couple conflict, the researchers with support from the National Science Foundation, developed algorithms to assess whether conflict was present among couples. This algorithm pulled together data from various sources including wearables, mobile phones, and physiological signals (or bio-signals) to assess couples’ emotional states. Data collected included body temperature, heart activity, sweat, audio recordings, assessment of language content and vocal intensity. The algorithm analyzing this data has proved to be up to 86 percent accurate in its ability to detect conflict episodes (based on participants’ hourly self-reports of when conflict occurred). The authors of the study believe it is the first instance in which passive modal computing is being collected and employed to detect conflict behavior in daily life.

Theodora Chaspari, an Electrical Engineering Ph.D student in Shri Naryanan’s SAIL lab at USC Viterbi, speaks of why this particular collaboration appealed to her and the SAIL group: “We could help beyond pure engineering domains, providing a more quantitative measures of human behavior.”

Lead author Adela C. Timmons, a psychology Ph.D student in Gayla Margolin’s Family Studies Project team at USC Dornsife, together with Chaspari runs the USC Couple Mobile Sensing Project with “the eventual goal of developing interventions to improve couple functioning.” In addition to the notion of helping couples who can’t often replicate the interventions and behavioral strategies they learn and practice in therapist’s office, Timmons spoke about the importance of this research in detecting and perhaps having couples minimize conflict in their relationships. She indicates that negative relationships (or the absence of positive relationships) have long been recognized as a health risk. The quality of relationships, Timmons said, can provide health benefits. Further, she indicates that research has shown that those with healthy relationships have less stress and that chronic stress is known to cause “wear and tear” on the body.

The authors say that the next step in the research is using such unobtrusive, passive technologies to anticipate conflict —perhaps five minutes before it might occur, by letting computer software determine the likelihood that conflict will occur. The other part of anticipating conflict is developing early interventions—possible real-time interventions or behavioral prompts such as text notifications of a partner’s psychological state or to guide an individual to meditate before bringing that conflict home.

Chaspari acknowledges that this is not a one-fits-all approach. Machine learning software can learn what is most useful in an individual. For example, for any given person, certain factors might have more weight in predicting conflict.

Once this system has been proven, the authors anticipate that it can be employed to other important relationships such as a parent-child dynamic. (For more from the author of “Wearable Technology Aims to Predict Relationships, Intervene When Computer Detects Trouble” please click HERE)

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Using algorithms partially modeled on the human brain, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have enabled computers to predict the immediate future by examining a photograph.

A program created at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) essentially watched 2 million online videos and observed how different types of scenes typically progress: people walk across golf courses, waves crash on the shore, and so on. Now, when it sees a new still image, it can generate a short video clip (roughly 1.5 seconds long) showing its vision of the immediate future.

“It’s a system that tries to learn what are plausible videos — what are plausible motions you might see,” says Carl Vondrick, a graduate student at CSAIL and lead author on a related research paper to be presented this month at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Barcelona. The team aims to generate longer videos with more complex scenes in the future.

But Vondrick says applications could one day go beyond turning photos into computer-generated GIFs. The system’s ability to predict normal behavior could help spot unusual happenings in security footage or improve the reliability of self-driving cars, he says.

If the system spots something unusual, like an animal of a type it hasn’t seen before running into the road, Vondrick explains that the vehicle “can detect that and say, ‘Okay, I’ve never seen this situation before — I can stop and let the driver take over,’ for example.” (Read more from “Deep Learning: Teaching Computers to Predict the Future” HERE)

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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates used to memorize employees’ license plate numbers so that he could keep track of when they were arriving at work and leaving.

Gates, who is now co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, described his intense management style from Microsoft’s early days during an interview on the BBC Radio 4 program “Desert Island Discs.”

“I had to be a little careful not to try and apply my standards to how hard [others at the company] worked. I knew everybody’s licence plate so I could look out the parking lot and see, you know, when people come in,” he said. “Eventually I had to loosen up as the company got to a reasonable size” . . .

The philanthropist also described his relationship with Apple co-founder and tech icon Steve Jobs during the radio interview.

“Steve really is a singular person in the history of personal computing in terms of what he built at Apple,” he said. “For some periods, we were completely allies working together – I wrote software for the original Apple II. Sometimes he would be very tough on you, sometimes he’d be very encouraging. He got really great work out of people.” (Read more from “Bill Gates Monitored Microsoft Employees’ Work Hours by Memorizing Their License Plates” HERE)

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