A star University of Maryland (UMD) professor built a machine-learning software “useful for surveillance” as part of a six-figure research grant from Chinese tech giant Alibaba, raising concerns that an American public university directly contributed to China’s surveillance state.
Alibaba provided $125,000 in funding to a research team led by Dinesh Manocha, a professor of computer science at UMD College Park, to develop an urban surveillance software that can “classify the personality of each pedestrian and identify other biometric features,” according to research grant documents obtained via public records request.
“These capabilities will be used to predict the behavior of each pedestrian and are useful for surveillance,” the document read.
Alibaba’s surveillance products gained notoriety in 2020, when researchers found that one of its products, Cloud Shield, could recognize and classify the faces of Uyghur people. Human rights group believe these high-tech surveillance tools play a major role in the ongoing Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang.
“The bottom line is that Alibaba financed U.S. academic research that was tailor-made for China’s surveillance state,” Ryan Fedasiuk, an associate fellow at the Center for New American Security, said in an email to The Daily Beast.
Manocha is a decorated scholar in the AI and robotics field who has earned awards and accolades from Google, IBM, and many others. His star status brings rewards: Maryland taxpayers paid $355,000 in salaries to the professor in 2021, according to government watchdog Open the Books. The U.S. military also provides lavish funding for the professor’s research, signing a $68 million agreement with Manocha’s lab to research military applications of AI technologies.
But Maryland taxpayers and the U.S. military are not the only ones funding Manocha’s research. In January 2018, the University of Maryland and Alibaba signed an 18-month research contract funding Manocha’s research team.
In the grant document obtained by The Daily Beast, Manocha’s team pledged to “work closely with Alibaba researchers” to develop an urban surveillance software that can identify pedestrians based on their unique gait signatures. The algorithm would then use the gait signatures to classify pedestrians as “aggressive,” “shy,” “impulsive,” and other personalities.
The grant required UMD researchers to test the algorithm on videos provided by Alibaba and present their findings in person at Alibaba labs in China. The scholars also had to provide the C++ codebase for the software and the raw dataset as deliverables to Alibaba.
The software’s “clear implication is to proactively predict demonstrations and protests so that they might be quelled,” Fedasiuk told The Daily Beast. “Given what we know now about China’s architecture of repression in Xinjiang and other regions, it is clear Dr. Manocha should not have pitched this project, and administrators at UMD should not have signed off on it.”
What are we, children?
Nor moral or ethical compunction?
Why would anyone expect that? For where we are now, these article writers just keep rehashing the same stuff and asking the same questions, as if everything is just some superficial circumstances.
Another thing is that “they” have told us for forever not to judge a book by its cover, yet they have always done that and now they’ve got algorithms for doing so. And you know what? You’ve all been falling for it.
“BIDEN BUCKS”, “Biden’s death warrant on American freedom”
Just saw a summary of this as an ad on Youtube, and found this similar video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwP7E3XqFRI
Rule by executive order is apparently unconstitutional; but the American people have been letting this happen for decades. It’s never too late to enforce the Constitution.
Dear Mr. Patrick Wood,
You’re awesome! Thank you from The Columbia Gorge (with it’s constant/ponderous reminder of the deluge !-)
Imagine if this system was used on the members of the elite. They would all fail miserably and have the worst social credit on earth.
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God. I do not want to hear about this traitor-for-profit. A true Benedict Arnold.
[…] American Professor Designed Dystopian Surveillance System for China […]
[…] American Professor Designed Dystopian Surveillance System for China […]