Tech firms race to spot video violence

SINGAPORE: Companies from Singapore to Finland are racing to improve artificial intelligence so software can automatically spot and block videos of grisly murders and mayhem before they go viral on social media.

None, so far, claim to have cracked the problem completely.

A Thai man who broadcast himself killing his 11-month-old daughter in a live video on Facebook this week, was the latest in a string of violent crimes shown live on the social media company.

The incidents have prompted questions about how Facebook’s reporting system works and how violent content can be flagged faster.

A dozen or more companies are wrestling with the problem, those in the industry say. Google – which faces similar problems with its YouTube service – and Facebook are working on their own solutions.

Most are focusing on deep learning: a type of artificial intelligence that makes use of computerised neural networks.

It is an approach that David Lissmyr, founder of Paris-based image and video analysis company Sightengine, says goes back to efforts in the 1950s to mimic the way neurons work and interact in the brain.

Teaching computers to learn with deep layers of artificial neurons has really only taken off in the past few years, said Matt Zeiler, founder and CEO of New York-based Clarifai, another video analysis company.

It’s only been relatively recently that there has been enough computing power and data available for teaching these systems, enabling “exponential leaps in the accuracy and efficacy of machine learning”, Zeiler said.

The teaching system begins with images fed through the computer’s neural layers, which then ‘learn’ to identify a street sign, say, or a violent scene in a video.

Violent acts might include hacking actions, or blood, says Abhijit Shanbhag, CEO of Singaporebased Graymatics.

If his engineers can’t find a suitable scene, they film it themselves in the office.

Zeiler says Clarifai’s algorithms can also recognise objects in a video that could be precursors to violence – a knife or gun, for instance. But there are limits. — Reuters