Texas Smart City Forum - Privacy Challenges in Smart Home Computer Vision

Smart surveillance or smart home cameras, such as Amazon Echo and Nest Cam, are now found in millions of locations to remotely link users to their homes or offices, providing monitoring services to enhance security and/or notify environment changes, as well as lifelogging and intelligent services. Such a prevalence of smart cameras has reinvigorated the privacy debate, since most of them require to upload device-captured visual data to the centralized cloud for analytics. We seek to explore: how to make sure that those smart computer vision devices are only seeing the things that we want them to see (and how to define what we want)? Is it at all possible to alleviate the privacy concerns, without compromising on user convenience? This talk will discuss the technical challenges and our proposed mitigations to this problem. Learn more. Atlas Wang is an assistant professor and fellow of the Jack Kilby/Texas Instruments Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Computer Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas as Austin.