Import AI 419: Amazon's millionth robot; CrowdTrack; and infinite games

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Tracking multiple people in crowded scenes with CrowdTrack:
…Turnkey authoritarianism via AI…
Researchers with Fudan University in China have built CrowdTrack, a dataset and benchmark for using AI to track pedestrians in video feeds. CrowdTrack is interesting mostly because of what it says about the current state of surveillance - we can do most forms of video surveillance, but still have trouble tracking multiple people in fast-moving real world crowds.

What the dataset consists of: The dataset is made up of 33 videos containing 40,000 distinct image frames and over 700,000 annotations. CrowdTrack contains over 5,000 individual trajectories - objects that are tracked across multiple frames.
"All data is collected in unconstrained daily environments, ensuring object behaviors remain natural and unmodified", the researchers write. "While typical daily scenarios often involve slow-paced movement and low clothing similarity, we intentionally included footage from building sites to introduce unique challenges: workers’ uniform workwear and helmets suppress facial feature discriminability, thereby emphasizing the importance of gait and body shape features for tracking."

Why this matters - scalable authoritarianism: One of the things that makes authoritarianism expensive is the overhead that comes from building out and running a large-scale police state. One of the things AI does is make it much, much cheaper to do large-scale surveillance. Datasets like CrowdTrack are a symptom of the way AI is making it cheaper and easier to do surveillance that the dictators of the 20th century would have fantasized about but always been unable to fully fund. "Our dataset can be used for tasks like visual grounding, captioning, and appearance feature extraction," the researchers write.
Read more: CrowdTrack: A Benchmark for Difficult Multiple Pedestrian Tracking in Real Scenarios (arXiv).
Get the dataset and code here: CrowdTrack (CrowdTrack, GitHub).

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Amazon deploys its millionth robot:
…Infrastructure for an autonomous superintelligence-run corporation…
Amazon has recently deployed its 1 millionth robot into its warehouses, "building on our position as the world's largest manufacturer and operator of mobile robotics." These robots are predominantly the hockey puck shaped robots used for moving and lifting shelves, though the company has recently started experimenting with robots for managing conveyor belts and doing some pick and place tasks. For perspective, Amazon said in the fall ...