Avatar Officer Installed at Arizona-Mexico Border Station
August 7th, 2012Via: Scientific American:
People crossing the Mexican border into Nogales, Ariz., this week will have a chance to meet U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s newest officer—a polite yet no-nonsense bilingual gatekeeper with a thick shock of black hair and a striped gray tie. He may not have a name or join his fellow officers for coffee or lunch breaks, but his presence will likely be welcomed both by them and the commuters who regularly pass through this southern Arizona outpost on their way to and from Mexico.
That is because the new recruit is an avatar, a virtual border patrol officer residing in a kiosk developed by researchers at the University of Arizona to facilitate border crossings.
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The kiosk is not designed to indicate that an interviewee is lying or to diagnose that person’s intent, says Aaron Elkins, a University of Arizona postdoctoral researcher in the Management Information Systems department who helped develop the kiosk. Instead the kiosk analyzes an interviewee’s voice for anomalies that may prompt a border officer to probe deeper into a particular response.
Anomaly detection is based on vocal characteristics—changes in factors such as rate, volume, pitch and intonation—that may be related to different emotional, arousal and cognitive states. An inflection in one’s voice may indicate uncertainty, or a pause might imply that an interviewee may have been devising a deceptive answer, Elkins says. The kiosk’s speech recognition software monitors the content of an interviewee’s answers and can flag a response indicating when, for example, a person acknowledges having a criminal record.
How does that jive with an individual’s “right to remain silent” when confronted by a law enforcement officer?
A: It doesn’t.
Apparently, they aren’t actually “rights”. Were they ever, really?
Ever tried to tell a “law enforcement officer” what your rights were in a situation where he has other ideas?
How did that go down exactly?
My point exactly.