Smart and Artistic Cities, Through Video Analytics

Past

Today's concept of Smart Cities is that the thousands of cameras and sensors installed in streets and public places will make cities safer and more efficient. However, the matter of dealing intelligently with the voluminous data is often ignored. I will discuss how our video analytics work attempts to balance edge-cloud issues and learning methods (unsupervised, active, deep) to facilitate effective decisions and predictions for large-scale public spaces. Safety and efficiency alone do not make great cities. I will also discuss art that makes use of public space cameras. Fifty years after Bell Labs' Experiments in Art and Technologies (E.A.T.) in New York City, this engineer-artist collaboration has been resurrected. I have worked with several artists and game-makers over the past few years to enable their concepts via our video analytics. I will discuss Brooklyn Blooms, Butterflies Alight, and a Liberty Science Center installation, and may even challenge the audience to a game.

Biography: Larry O'Gorman is a Fellow at Nokia Bell Labs Research in Murray Hill, NJ. He works in the areas of video analysis and multimedia signal processing. Previously he was Chief Scientist at Veridicom, a biometric company, spun off from Lucent, and before that a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. He has taught in the area of multimedia security at Cooper Union and NYU/Poly. His video analytics work is the basis of the 'Pixelpalooza' exhibit at the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey, and other public art and game exhibits. He has published over 70 technical papers, 8 book chapters, holds over 30 patents, and is co-author of the books, 'Practical Algorithms for Image Analysis' published by Cambridge University Press, and 'Document Image Processing' published by IEEE Press. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the IAPR. In 1996, he won the Best Industrial Paper Award at the ICPR and an R&D 100 Award for one of 'the top 100 innovative technologies of that year.' He has been on the editorial boards of 4 journals, and has served on US government committees to NIST, NSF, NIJ, and NAE, and to France's INRIA. He received the B.A.Sc., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa, University of Washington, and Carnegie Mellon University respectively.