Watching the Watchers

Come join a hands-on event with Dystopic Tech Watch and the Heinz Analytics Club to learn about how surveillance is intertwined in our lives and what we can do to raise awareness about it. Pizza provided!

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As cameras proliferate in public space, more and more data on people's physical movements is captured, stored, and analyzed at massive scale by state and corporate actors.

We'd like to empower people to watch their watchers. To do this, we are creating a dataset of labeled images of image-capture devices (e.g. kinds of cameras that enforce order in public space) then training a machine learning model to automatically recognize these cameras.

The trained model can become a platform for many applications, such as making maps of camera locations worldwide using Street View footage and building tools for local organizations in Pittsburgh. We’d also like to open-source the dataset and model to serve as a baseline for others to build on.

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Bonnie Fan

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