Posted on 01/08/2015 3:29:48 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
The federal government is financing the development of a smartphone app that will use facial recognition technology to check attendance in college classrooms.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $50,000 to Missouri University on Jan. 2 for the project that will record videos to create “face tracklets” of students.
The project is necessary, the grant argues, because checking attendance the old fashioned way is too hard.
“Checking attendance in scenarios such as classrooms commonly needs an instructor to recognize each student one by one by reading the names on a roster or ask students to sign up the attendance sheet,” the grant explains. “However, this traditional method faces two problems: reading students’ names may occupy minutes of lecture time when the number of students is large and letting students to sign up an attendance sheet is prone to be cheated since they can sign their own names and their classmates’ names who are absent in the class.”
“It is not a desirable task for instructors to calculate the total attendance of every student in a semester by going through every attendance sheet manually,” the grant added.
The solution is training professors to use a mobile app that will keep track of attendance by storing photos of all of their students, according to the NSF grant.
“By taking videos of student faces in classrooms using Smartphone cameras, the team proposes a unified framework of visual face detection, tracking and recognition algorithms to recognize multi-faces in the video simultaneously,” the grant said.
The study, led by Zhaozheng Yin, an assistant professor in Missouri University’s computer sciences department, will involve professors taking a video of each student’s face during the first lecture.
“The application will automatically build a face dataset for the course and the instructor only needs to identify them for the first class; in the remaining classes, instructors take videos of each class and the application will do automated attendance check,” the grant said.
The app will store “face tracklets,” or multiple photos of a student in different poses.
Before he was awarded the grant, Yin published a study “Who Missed the Class?–Unifying Multi-Face Detection, Tracking, and Recognition in Videos,” which explains the methodology of the proposed project.
The preliminary study trained face recognizers using a series of images of students making different facial expressions, and concluded that videos could be an effective way to check attendance.
The NSF has invested in other projects using facial recognition technology, including a universal BMI detector that “can be used by everybody at anywhere and anytime,” costing taxpayers over $200,000.
Nanny State PING!
College?
I love Big brother.
I support this fully. Anyone stupid enough to accept it SHOULD be tracked and monitored as much as our tech allows.
Continuing the slide to oblivion in society. Lets turn all kid into digital images. There is not time to acknowledge them personally and individually anymore. They are just part of the stream.
Feds and apps don’t mix.
This should go over like the Obamacare rollout.
Is Kathleen Sebelius involved?
If it can identify kids sitting in a classroom, it can identify you walking down the street, or out on the lake fishing.
ang how long do they think it will take students to hack it?
Can someone tell me in what year education became the responsibility of the government to provide?
As for me, I learned how to read (Spanish, initially) when I was 2 or 3, long before I started school.
By the time I started, I could even read some English, but I didn’t speak or understand it too well.
soon to be installed on every newborn heifer (oops, sheeplet?) by order of The One (or his woman) ...
to keep good track of us all
“College?”
Of COURSE! Communist indoctrination must be COMPLETE! Anything less than 100% attendance might result in a weakening of revolutionary resolve! /sarcasm;)
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
If a person pays for his or her school, he or she has the right to skip class.
I take great exception to this. Unlike primary and secondary education where attendance is required by law, higher education is voluntary and paid for by the student (parents, et al.). Consequently, the concept of mandatory attendance is dubious and spying on the students is abhorrent!
No, I am not opposed to regular classroom attendance. It is simply not government's business at any level. And using monitoring systems to spy on free adults (that's what college students are)is completely wrong and illegal.
Leave attendance between the instructors (usually graduate assistants vice the professors that the students paid for) and the students. It has sorted itself out for centuries.
When I was going to college (1960s) attendance was only taken in my language class and my labs. If you passed your tests and did the assigned work you passed the class. I had several classes where the final was 100% of the grade. No one cared if you were in class or not.
OK. As a male, I’ll just ask a female friend to park my cel phone in the girl’s bathroom in the morning.
If they want to check, I’m just being “gender enlightened”.
I’ll be enlightened all day. And they won’t want to prove otherwise.
I got your revolutionary resolve right here! (Not you Frank, but those who actually hold that opinion)
Uh-huh...we all know where this is going...
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