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China Education

High School in China Installs Facial Recognition Cameras To Monitor Students' Attentiveness (theepochtimes.com) 152

Posted by msmash from the going-extreme dept.
A high school in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province located on the eastern coast of China, has employed facial recognition technology to monitor students' attentiveness in class, local media reports. From the report: At Hangzhou Number 11 High School, three cameras at the front of the classroom scan students' faces every 30 seconds, analyzing their facial expressions to detect their mood, according to a May 16 report in the state-run newspaper The Paper. The different moods -- surprised, sad, antipathy, angry, happy, afraid, neutral -- are recorded and averaged during each class. A display screen, only visible to the teacher, shows the data in real-time. A certain value is determined as a student not paying enough attention. A video shot by Zhejiang Daily Press revealed that the system -- coined the "smart classroom behavior management system" by the school -- also analyzes students' actions, categorized into: reading, listening, writing, standing up, raising hands, and leaning on the desk.
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High School in China Installs Facial Recognition Cameras To Monitor Students' Attentiveness More

High School in China Installs Facial Recognition Cameras To Monitor Students' Attentiveness

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  • Mechanisms of propaganda. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    See how the message is received and refine until accepted.

    • Re: Mechanisms of propaganda. (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Next they'll have electric shock for not paying attention

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        In the old days the teacher kept an eye on his students... and a whack on the wrist with a ruler was the first warning. These days everyone is SJW'd and their kids are assholes.

        • Classic South Park
          https://youtu.be/MBEfHZITrgo [youtu.be]

      • Or if lots of kids are not paying attention, they can fire the teacher and hire a new teacher able to make the lessons more interesting.

        • Or if lots of kids aren't paying attention, they could be dismissed and allowed to roam the streets freely, while their places at school are taken by kids who want to be there.

          • That's an excellent plan. I can't see anything wrong with an entire segment of a generation growing up functioning at an mid-elementary grade level, can you? Surely that couldn't possibly cause massive problems years later....

          • Or if lots of kids aren't paying attention, they could be dismissed and allowed to roam the streets freely

            If most of the kids are not paying attention, that is the teacher's fault. Any subject can be interesting if presented in the right way. I once took an evening course on "Introduction to Bookkeeping" at my local community college. The 80 year old geezer teaching the course kept us on the edge of our seats with stories of how he uncovered fraud, embezzling and lapping [investopedia.com]. Did you ever see the movie The Accountant [wikipedia.org]? I think it was about him.

      • It's about time they used this technology to help the children, instead of just using it for advertising!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drnb ( 2434720 )

      See how the message is received and refine until accepted.

      Not only that, identify those who are not enthusiastically accepting the message. That will be important in the Communist Party's History and Political Science classes. It will help identify those who need a "supplemental" class.

    • Holy fuck.
      This really is "1984" for real.

  • Because... (Score:3)

    by taiwanjohn ( 103839 ) on Sunday May 27, 2018 @09:05PM (#56686188)

    Falling asleep in class would be a huge loss of, umm... prestige?

    • A loss of points on your Social Score, perhaps. You know, the thing that tracks Chinese citizens' behaviour and bars them from flying and other "privileges" if the score drops too low.

  • If we had this in my generation (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I would have ended-up as a drop-out instead of a Ph.D.

  • Upgrades (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Sunday May 27, 2018 @09:11PM (#56686216)

    the system also analyzes students' actions, categorized into: reading, listening, writing, standing up, raising hands, and leaning on the desk.

    Soon to come: doodling, fomenting rebellion, gossiping, sleeping, reading non-class materials, and pranking.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Soon to come, shut down of the system due to stress levels created in the vulnerable excitable somewhat unstable adolescent students having an extreme negative impact on grade results. Stressing the crap out of most students does not improve their grade, sure they can fake discipline, whilst inside they seethe with carefully hidden rage, that builds and builds and builds. Want to kill creativity, what to murder inventiveness, want to slaughter imagination, than this is the way to go and good luck keeping up

    • Re:Upgrades (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bursch-X ( 458146 ) on Sunday May 27, 2018 @09:42PM (#56686324)
      Even sooner to come: wrongthink, doubting the propaganda, not being a good citizen, dissentient thinking

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday May 27, 2018 @09:15PM (#56686228)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • any authoritarian regime does. Here in America we do it with religion. You need to put a damper on progress somehow if you want to say in power.
    • It makes me think of the Sci-Fi book, The Stainless Steel Rat [wikipedia.org], where the anti-hero, the rat, refined his skills and became super criminal getting around the very strong security. (He ended up using his skills to capture crooks like him.) The very strong security honed his skills ( the "stainless steel part") so that he became a super criminal. Could these cameras create the students you describe, ones who fake attentiveness and comprehension? I think it is possible.

      • I'm even a Harry Harrison fan, but that series was just crap that he spewed out quickly to make his publisher happy between more serious creative efforts.

        I know, many teenagers find it entertaining. Try reading it again though, now, and see if it still seems insightful.

    • Re:What happened to good old-fashioned test scores (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @03:05AM (#56687204) Homepage Journal

      Or maybe it's just a tool to assist the teacher when they have to deal with a large class of kids. I'm not saying it isn't Orwellian, merely that perhaps it's not designed to force the kids to pay attention but rather to help the teacher notice where they need to focus their attention. Managing 30 kids who have to do boring work is hard.

      I actually know some Chinese kids, and I've seen their school... It wasn't some kind of Party Loyalty factory, it was just a normal school full of normal kids but with more of a focus on rote learning than we have in the west.

      • You would have said the same if you saw us in class 35 years ago behind the wall. It works via self censorship. By the time you are 1st grade you already know to shut up and pretend...
        Go to NK and it will look even more peaceful and focused. But it is just a front...

        May I also remind all bleading heart sjw's about the cultural revolution so we don't droll over Chinese 'harmony' and 'order' least we invite it in our society. Thanks!

      • Maybe it is not even intended to help the teacher, but to help the student by teaching meritorious behavior.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      Then they will fail their tests and teachers will think that they are retarded. And as a result they will be sent to where the retards are sent instead of the teachers understanding that it is an attention problem and deal with it correctly.

      Smart kids failing their tests because they find their lecture boring and don't listen at all is very common, and mistaking it for low intelligence is probably the worst thing you can do to them. So while there are many reasons to oppose the system, defeating it may back

  • And shit like this will be the norm around the world as the other nations strive to follow their lead Too bad that by 2030 the US will be a nation of bible banging morons with no education living poverty But the US Prison Industry will use this on their 100m+ population of "Prison Workers" manning the Factories they voted for Trump to build
  • I guess this will do... until they get those brain implants in.

  • Parents need to rip out the godxam cameras and go medieval on the authoritarian idiots that decided to install them. 1984 was a damn WARNING, not a HOWTO manual you f--kers...

    • Yeah, they tried that. It was called the Cultural Revolution. It didn't work quite as they expected it to.

  • China is getting ever creepier with monitoring. Gotta "love" commies.

    • What if it turns out that China stopped being Communist decades ago and are actually a semi-autocratic Confucian Republic?

      Does it change the creepiness?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        Now they are a dictatorship. Xi booted opposition.

        • Much of their society is ruled by local elected officials.

          So having one guy in charge of foreign policy and national direction leaves it exactly at "semi-autocratic Confucian Republic."

          Also, Xi Jinping didn't "boot" the opposition, he won the support of bunch of people in the party who are themselves elected by members of the party. So that part is all exactly as you would expect in a Confucian Meritocracy. In a Communist system you would expect instead of have selected the people with enough Virtue to choo

  • Yeah, like they have a choice? It's called indoctrination, conditioning. Get them use to it as kids, so they accept it easier as adults. Schools in the USA do the same thing, but not to this degree...YET.

  • they start with inappropriate boner tracking and social media
    "loss of face".

    Of course after a few generations, there won't be any more natural pregnancies due to the lack of sexual enthusiasm and fear of social repercussions.

  • Coming soon to a place near you (Score:3)

    by hyades1 ( 1149581 ) <hyades1@hotmail.com> on Sunday May 27, 2018 @11:09PM (#56686572)

    Does anybody doubt we'll be seeing something similar in American schools, stores, police stations and workplaces before long?

    American corporations have been telling us for years if we allow them to modify their wares to meet Chinese demands, the end result will be a China that is more free and more open.

    Instead, often with the assistance of Apple, Google, Microsoft and dozens of other corporations, China is tightening the screws on its population. Meanwhile, privacy in America is becoming a thing of the past, and the powers of "Free World" corporations and governments are increasing every day.

    • In America, if your parents want you to get ahead they'll buy you smart glasses that monitor your attention and make sure you're learning the Right Things.

      And other kids will still be doing Free Range learning.

      And poor kids will ignore all that stare out the window or doodle on the desk because they're not going to get in trouble at home for not having learned anything, and are also not encouraged to value education.

  • At least in the west, Big Brother still pretends that he isn't actually watching you ever second of the day.

  • Snow Crash (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Sunday May 27, 2018 @11:33PM (#56686628)

    As usual, the best sci-fi writers were well ahead of this curve. The following is an exerpt from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson in 1992:

    Y.T.'s mom pulls up the new memo, checks the time, and starts reading it. The estimated reading time is 15.62 minutes. Later, when Marietta does her end-of-day statistical roundup, sitting in her private office at 9:00 P.M., she will see the name of each employee and next to it, the amount of time spent reading this memo, and her reaction, based on the time spent, will go something like this:

    Less than 10 mm. Time for an employee conference and possible attitude counseling.

    10-14 min. Keep an eye on this employee; may be developing slipshod attittide.

    14-15.61 mm. Employee is an efficient worker, may sometimes miss important details.

    Exactly 15.62 mm. Smartass. Needs attitude counseling.

    15.63-16 mm. Asswipe. Not to be trusted.

    16-18 mm. Employee is a methodical worker, may sometimes get hung up on minor details.

    More than 18 mm. Check the security videotape, see just what this employee was up to (e.g., possible unauthorized restroom break).

    Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm fascinated by the change from minutes to millimeters. Can I subscribe to your newsletter?

  • Geography (Score:4, Funny)

    by Jesus H Rolle ( 4603733 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @12:22AM (#56686762)

    A high school in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province located on the eastern coast of China

    It's good that they specified which coast.

  • Does it deduct points from their 'social credit'?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The different moods -- surprised, sad, antipathy, angry, happy, afraid, neutral -- are recorded and averaged during each class. A display screen, only visible to the teacher, shows the data in real-time.

    I would have thought that the students' faces themselves show the data in real time; does this mean that even Chinese teachers can't recognize Chinese faces?

  • Fuck China

  • What I consider more terrifying is when you see this up against the Chinese implementing ratings on Social media. Every citizen will get a ranking, which again will dictate whether or not you'll be hired in a company etc. etc.

    These systems will almost be guaranteed to be connected at some point.

    Not much room for dissenting views in China.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • It was done since the 90's everywhere else (Score:3)

    by Laxator2 ( 973549 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @08:25AM (#56687950)

    I remember in the mid-90's when Windows NT was used everywhere in the corporate world, monitoring the employees was the order of the day. It was very common to hear from managers that were sales people and accountants things like:

    "Between 2 and 2:30 PM you did not type at all. Your colleague was typing all this time"

    Nowadays it is known that bosses take snapshots of the websites that the employees visit and put them on their individual files so they can use them during performance review.

    An none of this has anything to do with China.

  • And just how long will it be before the central authorities decide to add school attentiveness scores to the social credit scores they are already using on adults to control their movements? And clearly getting good grades won't be enough for the advanced students who can handle the course work without paying a lot of attention to the teacher during regular class hours. The top scorers are going to be those who get tops grades and manage to keep an expression on their face that passes the automated criteria

    • It seems more likely that that is the purpose, rather than something where it would make sense to wonder "how long will it be before..."

  • I think they are raising a generation of Chinese people that will master emotion masquerade.

  • My uncle was a professor of education. He used to say that when a student fails it is the fault of the teacher. This sounds more like they think that the student is at fault for being bored mindless by a lousy teacher? Why not hide the scoring from anyone... then eliminate the teachers whose students show the lowest attentiveness scores?

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