Star American Professor Masterminded a Surveillance Machine For Chinese Big Tech (thedailybeast.com) 26
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: A star University of Maryland (UMD) professor built a machine-learning software "useful for surveillance" as part of a six-figure research grant from Chinese tech giant Alibaba, raising concerns that an American public university directly contributed to China's surveillance state. Alibaba provided $125,000 in funding to a research team led by Dinesh Manocha, a professor of computer science at UMD College Park, to develop an urban surveillance software that can "classify the personality of each pedestrian and identify other biometric features," according to research grant documents obtained via public records request. "These capabilities will be used to predict the behavior of each pedestrian and are useful for surveillance," the document read.
Manocha is a decorated scholar in the AI and robotics field who has earned awards and accolades from Google, IBM, and many others. His star status brings rewards: Maryland taxpayers paid $355,000 in salaries to the professor in 2021, according to government watchdog Open the Books. The U.S. military also provides lavish funding for the professor's research, signing a $68 million agreement with Manocha's lab to research military applications of AI technologies. But Maryland taxpayers and the U.S. military are not the only ones funding Manocha's research. In January 2018, the University of Maryland and Alibaba signed an 18-month research contract funding Manocha's research team. In the grant document obtained by The Daily Beast, Manocha's team pledged to "work closely with Alibaba researchers" to develop an urban surveillance software that can identify pedestrians based on their unique gait signatures. The algorithm would then use the gait signatures to classify pedestrians as "aggressive," "shy," "impulsive," and other personalities. The grant required UMD researchers to test the algorithm on videos provided by Alibaba and present their findings in person at Alibaba labs in China. The scholars also had to provide the C++ codebase for the software and the raw dataset as deliverables to Alibaba. The software's "clear implication is to proactively predict demonstrations and protests so that they might be quelled," Fedasiuk told The Daily Beast. "Given what we know now about China's architecture of repression in Xinjiang and other regions, it is clear Dr. Manocha should not have pitched this project, and administrators at UMD should not have signed off on it."
It's not just Alibaba that was interested in the professor's expertise. In January 2019 -- back when the Alibaba grant was still active -- Manocha secured a taxpayer-funded, $321,000 Defense Department grant for his research team. The two grants funded very similar research projects. The Alibaba award was titled "large-scale behavioral learning for dense crowds." Meanwhile, the DoD grant funded research into "efficient computational models for simulating large-scale heterogeneous crowds." Unsurprisingly, the research outputs produced by the two grants had significant overlap. Between 2019 and 2021, Manocha published multiple articles in the AI and machine-learning field that cited both the Alibaba and DoD grant. There is no evidence that Manocha broke the law by double-dipping from U.S. and Chinese funding sources to fund similar research projects. Nevertheless, the case still raises "serious questions about ethics in machine learning research," Fedasiuk said.
Manocha is a decorated scholar in the AI and robotics field who has earned awards and accolades from Google, IBM, and many others. His star status brings rewards: Maryland taxpayers paid $355,000 in salaries to the professor in 2021, according to government watchdog Open the Books. The U.S. military also provides lavish funding for the professor's research, signing a $68 million agreement with Manocha's lab to research military applications of AI technologies. But Maryland taxpayers and the U.S. military are not the only ones funding Manocha's research. In January 2018, the University of Maryland and Alibaba signed an 18-month research contract funding Manocha's research team. In the grant document obtained by The Daily Beast, Manocha's team pledged to "work closely with Alibaba researchers" to develop an urban surveillance software that can identify pedestrians based on their unique gait signatures. The algorithm would then use the gait signatures to classify pedestrians as "aggressive," "shy," "impulsive," and other personalities. The grant required UMD researchers to test the algorithm on videos provided by Alibaba and present their findings in person at Alibaba labs in China. The scholars also had to provide the C++ codebase for the software and the raw dataset as deliverables to Alibaba. The software's "clear implication is to proactively predict demonstrations and protests so that they might be quelled," Fedasiuk told The Daily Beast. "Given what we know now about China's architecture of repression in Xinjiang and other regions, it is clear Dr. Manocha should not have pitched this project, and administrators at UMD should not have signed off on it."
It's not just Alibaba that was interested in the professor's expertise. In January 2019 -- back when the Alibaba grant was still active -- Manocha secured a taxpayer-funded, $321,000 Defense Department grant for his research team. The two grants funded very similar research projects. The Alibaba award was titled "large-scale behavioral learning for dense crowds." Meanwhile, the DoD grant funded research into "efficient computational models for simulating large-scale heterogeneous crowds." Unsurprisingly, the research outputs produced by the two grants had significant overlap. Between 2019 and 2021, Manocha published multiple articles in the AI and machine-learning field that cited both the Alibaba and DoD grant. There is no evidence that Manocha broke the law by double-dipping from U.S. and Chinese funding sources to fund similar research projects. Nevertheless, the case still raises "serious questions about ethics in machine learning research," Fedasiuk said.
Should we? (Score:3)
It is always important to ask, Should we?
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed: should we make money the primary focus of academia?
The answer is of course "no", but that horse has long since bolted. It's weird to keep only the most ruthlessly money focused academics, then question why they went after money.
If you're not bringing in these kind of grants (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess my point is, we're _all_ complicit here. Including me. Nixon promised we'd open up China to democracy and the exact opposite happened. They used capitalism to export authoritarianism to here. Nixon wasn't dumb, he knew what has going on. And nobody here is dumb, we know. But the lure of cheap Chinese goods to fight inflation without the need for long term public policy we disagreed with politically makes strange bedfellows.
Re:If you're not bringing in these kind of grants (Score:5, Interesting)
to be blunt given how much more money corporate America makes supporting Chinese surveillance rather than shitting all over one professor
Indeed. We aren't going to "fix China" by refusing to let them fund academic research in America.
pretending to be a communist democracy.
China has never pretended to be a democracy.
Nixon promised we'd open up China to democracy
Nixon promised no such thing. He engaged in realpolitik and wanted China as a counterweight to the USSR. He had no concern for China's internal politics or human rights.
It was Bill Clinton and the Bushes who thought China might be enticed to democratize.
Re: (Score:3)
And that shows how myopic Kissinger and Nixon were. China, with its vast pop. would soon eclipse the Soviet Union as any dolt could see. In some sense they had to buy into the vision of China becoming less authoritarian if they believed a country strong enough to be counterweight to the Soviet Union would not also become a threat to the rest of the world.
And Kissinger continues to be a myopic dolt, telling the West to somehow find a way to acquiesce to Russian aggression on Ukraine.
Re:If you're not bringing in these kind of grants (Score:4, Interesting)
The real story is the western world learned exactly nothing for the experiences of the first half of the 20th century. Yes it made it into some text books and people can regurgitate but they have not internalized it.
We know appeasement does not work. We know certain values and social systems are fundamentally incompatible with our own as in really can't co-exist. We know tolerating evil ultimately just weakens and corrupts the righteous.
We recognized the dangerous anti-democratic threat the soviets were at the end of WWII, they were every bit as dangerous as T.h.i.r.d R.e.i.c.h had been. Which is why we rushed in annexed as much of Germany as we could. We should have listened to folks who wanted to press on into the second world, and we should routed m.a.r.x.i.s.m then and there taking maximum advantage of spent Red-Army.
At least we had the will then to fight a cold war. By the time Nixon got office appeasement was the order of the day anyway you sliced it except for our proxy wars with the Soviet Union; where the policy on both sides as far as every other party was concerned was 'I don't care if he is a son of bitch as long as he is our son of a bitch'. Which is 99% of why the dangerous actors in the world today are in fact dangerous - which includes the CCP.
Re: (Score:2)
China, with its vast pop. would soon eclipse the Soviet Union as any dolt could see.
Nobody predicted the rise of China in 1972, a time when China's economy was shrinking, and Deng Xiaoping was in internal exile working on a pig farm.
Re: (Score:2)
but for a mere $125k? that's crazy cheap for what he provided.
Re: (Score:2)
How Very Mercenary (Score:3)
Manocha might not be interested in the World's geopolitical divisions... he may well be focused on the advancement of his field of study, regardless of the funding partner. It's the nature of academia and the continuous need for grants to fund its work.
It's also plausible he's an academic mercenary adorned with Star status, and believes he can do what he wants. He'd probably be an interesting dinner guest, with or without the fava beans and Chianti.
Re: (Score:1)
Greed Can Be Ugly (Score:3)
Especially when it conquers one's loyalty for the country where they live.
Re:Greed Can Be Ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
That isn't what was happening here. He was exploring how the folks in power could manipulate the actions/opinions of those not in power. Both the US govt and China approved of that. So, probably, did many corporations, even if they didn't offer him funding.
It's pretty ugly, but don't misunderstand the *way* in which it's ugly.
More worried about U.S.A. (Score:3, Interesting)
China has no access to traffic on Canadian internet infrastructure.
The U.S. has.
I give no fucks about China as a 'threat' to my freedom. Our so-called friends and their warmongering for profit and murdering of journalists and whistleblowers who expose it are more of a concern.
Re: (Score:1)
China has no access to traffic on Canadian internet infrastructure.
How can you possibly know such a thing?
Re: More worried about U.S.A. (Score:2)
Re: More worried about U.S.A. (Score:2)
Justin, is that you?
99.9% off sale (Score:5, Interesting)
So he gets about $100M of American funding and then sells the codebase to CCP for $125K?
And here we thought Alibaba was a moderate-discount shopping company.
Re: (Score:2)
He's not alone. (Score:2)
History will be his ultimate judge. In the meantime let's just put him in the same historical vicinity as Fritz Haber [unilad.com] or Thomas Midgley [wikipedia.org] who had grand ideals too. Hey, we all remember Edward Teller and his Project Plowshare [historynet.com] to use nuclear weapons to do things like making a new Panama Canal or harbors for Alaska.
Ladder (Score:1)
Given the amount, they probably paid for a grad student to work on it, who became a research team in the article main body who became a star professor in the title.
the problem isn't double dip funding (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Wish he'd get to work on a decent FLAC downloader, converter and player then. I'll throw in $5.
Bcom from Distance (Score:1)
Opinion (Score:1)