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Prof Yash
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How surveillance helps to put crooks behind bars PROFESSOR Mark Nixon has “had a few fights” with civil liberties groups in his time. As a world-leading expert in developing biometric techniques to identify people using CCTV — every anti-surveillance campaigner’s Big Bother bęte noir — he knows all too well what they think of his work. “They say we’re ruining their privacy,” he says. “I don’t think their personal liberty is in danger.” The techniques he has pioneered “have been used to put murderers away — and I agree with that”. Through the work of Prof Nixon and Dr John Carter at Southampton University, UK, it is becoming increasingly easy for authorities to monitor us all. Research at the School of Electronics and Computer Science — funded by the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence among others — means technology can spot and identify criminals in surveillance footage with increasing accuracy. Now Prof Nixon’s department has received extra funding from GCHQ to form part of the national Cyber Security Centre of Excellence, with Southampton specialising in biometrics: ID-ing people using personal traits or physical characteristics. It’s a controversial area of science which Prof Nixon can claim to have helped father. One of the key aspects is gait analysis: allowing people to be identified by their body shape and the way they walk. It has helped solve several crimes in Britain and in Sweden helped convict the killer of foreign minister Anna Lindh in 2003. The potential of such surveillance systems is enormous. But so too, warn campaigners, are the privacy risks. Last year the UK’s first Surveillance Commissioner, Andrew Rennison, said there was a worrying lack of regulation over how CCTV is used, and that human rights laws may be broken in the process. “It is the Big Brother scenario playing out large,” he said. “It’s the ability to pick out your face in a crowd half a mile away.” But Prof Nixon rejects this. “Privacy concern has a long history. If you read into the history of maps, people didn’t want the cheeky bastards making maps of their land. People are always suspicious of what they don’t know, but most people would say they don’t mind the police knowing if they can eliminate a serious threat. [But] we do need some appropriate legal framework and we haven’t got it. I’ve been trying to convince lawyers to work on it but if there isn’t a case they don’t tend to work on it, which is bizarre.” The need is likely only to increase. Soon artificial intelligence programming may be able to alert security personnel to suspicious behaviour automatically before the person in their sights has done anything illegal. “Screens and monitors are actually very hard for a human to keep their attention on,” says Prof Nixon. “We could use artificial intelligence to alert people to events, using activity monitoring to spot suspicious behaviour. How do you flag suspicious behaviour? There are now databases in our department set up purely to evaluate this sort of thing.” His research into facial recognition, which turns the measurements of someone’s facial features into a series of numbers to be matched against a database by a computer, has played a large part in making it a viable technique — one that was used in the wake of the 2011 London riots in an attempt to catch looters and those breaking the law in other ways. And as Prof Nixon says: “Your identity is manifest in many different ways.” Ears, eyes, footsteps — all can be used to identify people. Even your heartbeat can betray who you are, and it can be detected from a distance without requiring contact with the body. For those wearing masks or scarves over their faces, there are still plenty of ways computers can identify them. Much of the research has been carried out in the “biometrics tunnel” built in Prof Nixon’s department. It’s a facility that requires a lot of technical expertise and patience — as Dr Carter tells us: “I’ve spent the last three months tracking down a fault in a cable.” As I wander down it, eight cameras film my strides from a variety of angles against multicolour backgrounds, allowing electronic silhouettes and a 3D virtual model of my body to be constructed by a computer. The distance between my feet, knees, hips, shoulders and head are measured and the pattern of their motion analysed. Were I suspected of a crime, the police would then be able to compare my gait profile to information gathered from CCTV footage of the incident — either eliminating me from their enquiries or encouraging them to delve deeper. “We helped in a conviction of a bagsnatcher who robbed somebody,” says Prof Nixon. “He’d covered up his face with a motorbike helmet, that withheld his DNA, as there was no spit or breath. He wore gloves, so there were no fingerprints left — everything was covered up. But he still ran. We used images of him and presented images to the judge.” Some of the work in the new centre will go into online identification. Keystroke analysis, looking at the minute differences in timings and patterns between different computer users’ typing mannerisms, is under development. And Prof Vladimiro Sassone, the Director of Southampton’s Cyber Security Centre, says the use of vocabulary, grammar and choice of words may yet be enough under what he calls “cybermetrics”. “You might have two different identities on a social network but the particular choice of words you picked can reveal that they belong to the same person,” he says. “It mixes ideas from psychology and computer science and biometrics. I wouldn’t bet on when, but there is a chance this can be done.” Next on the agenda for Prof Nixon is soft-biometrics, which could see verbal descriptions from witnesses of crimes converted into computer code to scan through CCTV footage and pull out potential suspects. “We’re bridging the semantic gap,” he says. Prof Nixon is keen to point out that biometrics is not just about surveillance and crime catching, however. Iris recognition systems have been rolled out in many airports in the UK, and in Japan 40 per cent of the cash tellers have automatic finger vein technology to recognise the users. “Biometrics makes life convenient,” says Prof Nixon, imagining the perfect use of biometric identity recognition. “How about when you get to your front door with your papers under your arm and you look for your keys and you drop your papers in a puddle — wouldn’t it be nice if your door opened and said hello?” — The Independent
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THIS UNIVERSE How does Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity explain the Doppler effect on light waves, as the speed of light is the same in all frames? Special relativity and quantum mechanics beautifully explains the Doppler effect. Photons constituting a light beam have a frequency that is related to the energy of the photons. Indeed photon energy is equal to frequency multiplied by the Planck constant. This explains the "red shift" of light coming from stars and galaxies moving away from us; that is nothing but the Doppler effect. If we cook a half glass of rice, we get a pot full of them. Do they just swell or multiply on cooking? I do not think they do not multiply in the sense that the number of grains increases. However, each grain does swell and get bigger, thereby the amount of grain seems to increase. There are eight planets in our solar system. While Venus and Uranus rotate in the opposite direction, why do other six planets with the help of their gravitational force not allow Venus and Uranus to rotate in their direction?
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Britain suspends exploratory drilling of Antarctic lake LONDON: An ambitious British plan to search for minute forms of life in an ancient lake beneath Antarctica's ice has been suspended because of technical problems, the scientist leading the project said. In a move that clears the way for US and Russian teams to take the lead, Prof Martin Siegert said technical problems and a lack of fuel had forced the closure of the 7-million-pound project, which was looking for life forms and climate change clues in the lake-bed sediment.
After setbacks, Russia boosts space spending MOSCOW:
The country that oversaw the launch of the world’s first artificial satellite hopes to regain some of its former glory with a big boost in space spending announced by Russia after a series of failures. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev approved a plan to spend 2.1 trillion roubles ($68.71 billion) on developing Russia’s space industry from 2013 to 2020, state-run RIA news agency reported. Scientists map initial anti-aging formula HONG KONG: Scientists in Hong Kong appear to have mapped out a formula that can delay the aging process in mice, a discovery they hope to replicate in people. Their finding, published in the latest issue of Cell Metabolism, builds on their work in 2005 which shed light on premature aging, or progeria, a rare genetic disease that affects one in four million babies. — Reuters |
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I may not be sure about the celestial event that might have made Venus rotate in a direction other than the others, but I do not understand how the six planets rotating in a certain direction can force or persuade Venus to change its direction of rotation. I do not think persuasion will work in this case. 