Is That a Bomb in Your Pants or are You Just Happy To See Me?

There was a lot of uproar over the "Underpants Bomber" in the days after Christmas. The talking heads on the Sunday morning shows pounded the TSA hard and wanted to know how this guy got through. It isn't possible to point a finger at one reason. Tons of small mistakes led to the security breach. My sense is that most people feel airport security is ineffective.

Recent research backs that feeling up. A test at O'Hare found that TSA agents only found 60-75% of planted guns, knives and bombs (all fake of course). It's nearly 10 years after 9/11 and we're still not very good at airport security. Why? Well, according to research by Harvard Prof. Jeremy Wolfe, it turns out that human brains really suck at visually searching for rare events. When an item shows up only 2% of the time, which is the frequency of contraband in luggage, people miss the item 30% of the time. However, if the item appears 50% of the time, people miss the item 7% of the time.

One solution to the problem would be to insert staged contraband images into the image feeds so that 50% of the images contain a gun, knife or bomb. If TSA had done this last year, they would have intercepted 4,504,455 more prohibited items (most of it probably 60z bottles of hair gel).

At ReTel, we've experimented with similar techniques to improve the visual search capabilities of our auditors. Understanding the way the brain sees is a big part of successfully leveraging the crowd to analyze video.

Crowdsourcing and San Fran Awesomeness

Last night I went the Crowdsourcing Work Meetup event in my new hometown - San Francisco. The energy, passion, and excitement in this city is incredible. Chicago never could have staged this event. I feel really lucky to be here. ReTel is at the geographical and ideological epicenter of a brand new technology that is going to change the world. My co-founder, Adam Rodnitzky said it best - "This is turning into a movement." He's right. The wave is building and it is going to change lives all over the world.

Lucus Biewald, the CEO of Crowdflower, moderated and organized the event. He's a great guy, and if you're interested in crowdsourcing, you should read his blog - http://blog.doloreslabs.com/ . The other speakers were great as well. Here is a list:

Aaron Koblin, a local artist, who created The Sheep Market, Bicycle Built for Two Thousand and Ten Thousand Cents projects.

Leila Janah, a social entrepreneur who runs Samasource, our fantastic non-profit partner.

Sharon Chiarella, VP at Amazon in charge of Mechanical Turk.

Panos Ipeirotis NYU Stern school professor who writes one of my favorite blogs on crowdsourcing and Mechanical Turk.

If you want too see an amazing visualization of the power of crowdsourcing, go to Aaron Koblin's website - http://www.tenthousandcents.com/. It's amazing.

If you want to get into the underlying coding and theory behind crowdsourcing, go to Panos Ipeirotis blog -http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com.

If you want to learn about how crowdsourcing is going to save millions from poverty, go to http://www.samasource.com/.

Ok, I've got to go. I've got a board meeting this afternoon. :)

TechStars Changes Everything

Mark O'Sullivan, the CEO of Vanilla, blogged about TechStars today. He titled his post "TechStars for Life," and everything in it is 100% true. If you want to go to TechStars, read it. If you don't want to go to TechStars, read it and you'll know why you MUST to go to TechStars.

To put it simply: TechStars changes everything.

"Oh, but, George," you whine. "Didn't you have to give up 6% of ReTel's equity."

I robbed David Cohen blind. 6 points is a steal. Any start up with promise will earn these back ten-fold. You will get tremendous mentors, new customers, new partners, new investors, and a network of friends that will change your life.

It's the network of friends that meant the most to me. Of course all of these friends are business associates in one way or another, but the network you establish in TechStars and in Boulder goes way beyond - "you scratch my back, I'll scratch your back."

It probably sounds like bullshit, but they really care. David, Brad, Nicole, Andrew, Tim, Josh and all the founders believe that entrepreneurship is a truly noble pursuit; that it is something to be admired and nurtured for its own sake; and that each entrepreneurial success improves the chances for all entrepreneurs.

Why else would David open source the TechStars playbook? While I was there multiple incubators from around the country came in to see how he runs things. He freely shared everything with them.

So, if you have a start up or are thinking of launching a start up, apply to TechStars. It will change everything.

Artificial Intelligence - Why Bother?

Sometimes a complex problem has a simple answer.

The economist recently published an article on an advanced robot arm - http://bit.ly/8IqyF

A quick description:

"Shadow Robot has developed a robotic hand that closely mimics the human version. It has already sold several of them to various universities and to NASA, America’s space agency. And it has taken an order from Britain’s Ministry of Defence, which wants to try the hand out on the arm of a bomb-disposal robot. . . .

The robot hand mimics the movements of a human operator who wears a special “virtual reality” glove equipped with sensors that can determine the positions of the fingers inside it."

This seems really cool, and I can think of a lot of neat applications. What doesn't make sense to me are the next steps they plan to take:

"The next stage of development, says Mr Walker, will be to add some level of intelligence. The company is involved in a European Union programme to develop technology, such as machine vision, to make robots cleverer. This would enable the hand, for example, to recognise an object like an egg and know how to pick it up without breaking it. Unless, of course, it was clever enough to know that it was making an omelette."

Why add AI to this thing? For $4 bucks an hour or less, you could have people in India or China work remotely using these amazing hands, and they already know what an egg is. Strap the arms to a torso with wheels and a webcam and you have a fully functional C3P0. They should focus on getting the manufacturing costs of the arms down. It will take decades upon decades and millions of dollars for an AI creation to match what remote workers could do today.