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On-demand forensic video analytics for large-scale surveillance systems

Published in:
2019 IEEE Intl. Symp. on Technologies for Homeland Security, 5-6 November 2019.

Summary

This work presents FOVEA, an add-on suite of analytic tools for the forensic review of video in large-scale surveillance systems. While significant investment has been made toward improving camera coverage and quality, the burden on video operators for reviewing and extracting useful information from the video has only increased. Daily investigation tasks (such as searching through video, investigating abandoned objects, or piecing together information from multiple cameras) still require a significant amount of manual review by video operators. In contrast to other tools which require exporting video data or otherwise curating the video collection before analysis, FOVEA is designed to integrate with existing surveillance systems. Tools can be applied to any video stream in an on-demand fashion without additional hardware. This paper details the technical approach, underlying algorithms, and effects on video operator performance.
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Summary

This work presents FOVEA, an add-on suite of analytic tools for the forensic review of video in large-scale surveillance systems. While significant investment has been made toward improving camera coverage and quality, the burden on video operators for reviewing and extracting useful information from the video has only increased. Daily...

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Artificial intelligence: short history, present developments, and future outlook, final report

Summary

The Director's Office at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL) requested a comprehensive study on artificial intelligence (AI) focusing on present applications and future science and technology (S&T) opportunities in the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division (Division 5). This report elaborates on the main results from the study. Since the AI field is evolving so rapidly, the study scope was to look at the recent past and ongoing developments to lead to a set of findings and recommendations. It was important to begin with a short AI history and a lay-of-the-land on representative developments across the Department of Defense (DoD), intelligence communities (IC), and Homeland Security. These areas are addressed in more detail within the report. A main deliverable from the study was to formulate an end-to-end AI canonical architecture that was suitable for a range of applications. The AI canonical architecture, formulated in the study, serves as the guiding framework for all the sections in this report. Even though the study primarily focused on cyber security and information sciences, the enabling technologies are broadly applicable to many other areas. Therefore, we dedicate a full section on enabling technologies in Section 3. The discussion on enabling technologies helps the reader clarify the distinction among AI, machine learning algorithms, and specific techniques to make an end-to-end AI system viable. In order to understand what is the lay-of-the-land in AI, study participants performed a fairly wide reach within MIT LL and external to the Laboratory (government, commercial companies, defense industrial base, peers, academia, and AI centers). In addition to the study participants (shown in the next section under acknowledgements), we also assembled an internal review team (IRT). The IRT was extremely helpful in providing feedback and in helping with the formulation of the study briefings, as we transitioned from datagathering mode to the study synthesis. The format followed throughout the study was to highlight relevant content that substantiates the study findings, and identify a set of recommendations. An important finding is the significant AI investment by the so-called "big 6" commercial companies. These major commercial companies are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and IBM. They dominate in the AI ecosystem research and development (R&D) investments within the U.S. According to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, cumulative R&D investment in AI amounts to about $30 billion per year. This amount is substantially higher than the R&D investment within the DoD, IC, and Homeland Security. Therefore, the DoD will need to be very strategic about investing where needed, while at the same time leveraging the technologies already developed and available from a wide range of commercial applications. As we will discuss in Section 1 as part of the AI history, MIT LL has been instrumental in developing advanced AI capabilities. For example, MIT LL has a long history in the development of human language technologies (HLT) by successfully applying machine learning algorithms to difficult problems in speech recognition, machine translation, and speech understanding. Section 4 elaborates on prior applications of these technologies, as well as newer applications in the context of multi-modalities (e.g., speech, text, images, and video). An end-to-end AI system is very well suited to enhancing the capabilities of human language analysis. Section 5 discusses AI's nascent role in cyber security. There have been cases where AI has already provided important benefits. However, much more research is needed in both the application of AI to cyber security and the associated vulnerability to the so-called adversarial AI. Adversarial AI is an area very critical to the DoD, IC, and Homeland Security, where malicious adversaries can disrupt AI systems and make them untrusted in operational environments. This report concludes with specific recommendations by formulating the way forward for Division 5 and a discussion of S&T challenges and opportunities. The S&T challenges and opportunities are centered on the key elements of the AI canonical architecture to strengthen the AI capabilities across the DoD, IC, and Homeland Security in support of national security.
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Summary

The Director's Office at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL) requested a comprehensive study on artificial intelligence (AI) focusing on present applications and future science and technology (S&T) opportunities in the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division (Division 5). This report elaborates on the main results from the study. Since the...

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Learning network architectures of deep CNNs under resource constraints

Published in:
Proc. IEEE/CVF Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, CVPRW, 18-22 June 2018, pp. 1784-91.

Summary

Recent works in deep learning have been driven broadly by the desire to attain high accuracy on certain challenge problems. The network architecture and other hyperparameters of many published models are typically chosen by trial-and-error experiments with little considerations paid to resource constraints at deployment time. We propose a fully automated model learning approach that (1) treats architecture selection as part of the learning process, (2) uses a blend of broad-based random sampling and adaptive iterative refinement to explore the solution space, (3) performs optimization subject to given memory and computational constraints imposed by target deployment scenarios, and (4) is scalable and can use only a practically small number of GPUs for training. We present results that show graceful model degradation under strict resource constraints for object classification problems using CIFAR-10 in our experiments. We also discuss future work in further extending the approach.
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Summary

Recent works in deep learning have been driven broadly by the desire to attain high accuracy on certain challenge problems. The network architecture and other hyperparameters of many published models are typically chosen by trial-and-error experiments with little considerations paid to resource constraints at deployment time. We propose a fully...

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Feedback-based social media filtering tool for improved situational awareness

Published in:
15th Annual IEEE Int. Symp. on Technologies for Homeland Security, HST 2016, 10-12 May 2016.

Summary

This paper describes a feature-rich model of data relevance, designed to aid first responder retrieval of useful information from social media sources during disasters or emergencies. The approach is meant to address the failure of traditional keyword-based methods to sufficiently suppress clutter during retrieval. The model iteratively incorporates relevance feedback to update feature space selection and classifier construction across a multimodal set of diverse content characterization techniques. This approach is advantageous because the aspects of the data (or even the modalities of the data) that signify relevance cannot always be anticipated ahead of time. Experiments with both microblog text documents and coupled imagery and text documents demonstrate the effectiveness of this model on sample retrieval tasks, in comparison to more narrowly focused models operating in a priori selected feature spaces. The experiments also show that even relatively low feedback levels (i.e., tens of examples) can lead to a significant performance boost during the interactive retrieval process.
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Summary

This paper describes a feature-rich model of data relevance, designed to aid first responder retrieval of useful information from social media sources during disasters or emergencies. The approach is meant to address the failure of traditional keyword-based methods to sufficiently suppress clutter during retrieval. The model iteratively incorporates relevance feedback...

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