Para Bellum Solutions welcomes Chris Williams to our team. Following his Royal Australian Navy career, Chris gained firsthand experience delivering systems and components to numerous Australian naval ship build programs, spending a number of years as a Managing Director with Defence Industry. He currently fulfills senior Board roles whilst consulting into major programs. Chris is supporting us as a Senior Associate on a cutting-edge maritime program in Sydney.
Police Departments Are Turning to AI to Sift Through Millions of Hours of Unreviewed Body-Cam Footage
ProPublica: “…Axon, the nation’s largest provider of police cameras and of cloud storage for the video they capture, has a database of footage that has grown from around 6 terabytes in 2016 to more than 100 petabytes today. That’s enough to hold more than 5,000 years of high definition video, or 25 million copies of last year’s blockbuster movie “Barbie.” “In any community, body-worn camera footage is the largest source of data on police-community interactions. Almost nothing is done with it,” said Jonathan Wender, a former police officer who heads Polis Solutions, one of a growing group of companies and researchers offering analytic tools powered by artificial intelligence to help tackle that data problem. The Paterson, New Jersey, police department has made such an analytic tool a major part of its plan to overhaul its force…
In August 2023, the Los Angeles Police Department said it would partner with a team of researchers from the University of Southern California and several other universities to develop a new AI-powered tool to examine footage from around 1,000 traffic stops and determine which officer behaviors keep interactions from escalating. In 2021, Microsoft awarded $250,000 to a team from Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania to develop software that can organize video into timelines that allow easier review by supervisors…
One lesson has come through: Interactions that don’t end in violence are more likely to start with officers explaining what is happening, not interrupting civilians and making clear that cameras are rolling and the video is available to the public…”
- “We must test our philosophical arguments through their translation into other languages, looking at what philosophical questions, topics, problems and concepts become through translation” — an interview with Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia) on philosophizing in Wolof
- “A reminder of the fleeting dance, where all things must descend / Into the quiet arms of change, where even suns must end” — LucretiusGPT “looks” at images and describes them in the style of Lucretius
- “‘Inclination to pleasurable living and inclination to virtue are in conflict with each other,’ Kant writes. But the conflict can be resolved in the ‘civilized bliss’ of the dinner party” — Kieran Setiya (MIT) on the “ultimate Kantian experience”
- “Most compelling is the film’s suggestion that Spinoza’s ultimate beef, and the central problem the Amsterdam authorities had with him, lay in how he confronted existing power structures, both on earth and in a heavenly hierarchy” — on the new documentary, “Spinoza: 6 Reasons for the Excommunication of the Philosopher”
- “Do not be fooled that pretense has no cost. When little lies degrade the bonds between representation and reality, we corrupt the knowledge that guides action… Do not be fooled that technology’s trade-offs are obvious. It is technology’s nature to make us forget the hidden virtues of the things it overcomes” — Greg Jackson critiques our world
- “Paradox Garden” lays out the structure of arguments from philosophical articles and elsewhere for discussion — on Facebook
- Want a burial plot next to Karl Marx’s? — it will set you back £25,000