BU Research Blog

Staff, students and members of the public are invited to join us for the next Cyber Security Seminar…

‘Understanding Crowdsourcing and CCTV surveillance’

Tuesday, 27th May

Coyne Lecture Theatre 

4pm – 5pm

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) has many different uses but is often considered an archetypal surveillance technology. These infrastructures generate large amounts of data; so much so that the technique of crowdsourcing has recently been applied to the problem of searching for abnormalities in live surveillance video; the premise being that many inexpert watchers are cheaper but as efficient as a small number of experienced security experts. However, the merits of crowdsourcing watchers of surveillance video are largely unknown.

In this talk Dr. Paul Dunphy will describe exemplar infrastructures of this type, and two user studies that assess the performance of the watchers of CCTV video online. The results prompt a discussion regarding the effectiveness of using crowdsourcing in such contexts, and the role such infrastructures can play in society.

Speaker Bio: Paul is a postdoctoral researcher in the Culture Lab at Newcastle University. He is interested in multi-disciplinary approaches to understand and design security and privacy technologies.

 If you would like to join us for this presentation, please book your place via Eventbrite.