Before you throw that old, clunky, obsolete Android phone away, you might want to consider keeping it as it may someday be valuable. No, we’re not talking about auctioning them off someday as relics, but more like a functional purpose. A team from Carnegie Mellon University have created a program that can take those old phones or any connected surveillance cameras and turn them into Zensors, giving you information and triggering a consequential action.
The smartphones and cameras will need to be placed in the environment that you want to monitor. When you open the program, you need to click on an area of interest, or what you want the camera to be looking at. The video example uses a parking lot that needs to be monitored. Then you get to ask a question (make sure it’s in a “natural language”), for example, “How many cars are in the parking lot. Then you will indicate a trigger, for example, if there are more than 10 cars in the parking lot, it will send a message to a certain email or number.
But if you think that this is stuff from sci-fi movies, it’s actually a little less magical than that. For now, the program is just using a hybrid of computers and crowd-sourced people to monitor the situation. It is a little like the Mechanical Turks of Amazon. The machines are “learning” from how the humans are answering the questions and eventually they will reach a level of understanding so that the humans will no longer be needed to provide the information.
Okay, that last part sounds a bit scary, but if this works, it will be a cool way of monitoring and automating actions that we’ll leave to the machines to help us with. Still sounds scary. But this is actually a result of technologies from the past few years, including Google Now/Siri/Amazon Echo, IFTTT programming and the aforementioned Mechanical Turks. Just don’t hold your breath for this to actually happen anytime soon.
VIA: Gizmodo
