This is neat. I worked on something similar to college where we built an app to track how long the line was at a popular cafe. We set up a camera + raspberry pi in the cafe and tried to the number of people. There was a lot of noise from overlapping people, random people walking in and out of line, etc. Cool seeing all the techniques and approaches you tried!
Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
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Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#22UW Madison UPL on Hacker News! Great to see, you guys are awesome!
Thank you!
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally, you cannot just record people without their consent; but this also largely depends on the jurisdiction/situation. Almost nowhere (or actually nowhere?) are you allowed to set up a surveillance device into a space that is not public and it is not owned by you.
Public university labs are generally public as they're state property (in this particular case, UW Madison is a public state University). Further, recording video or pictures of people in public places is broadly legal in the US. There are only "presumption of privacy" restrictions which apply to places such as bathrooms and private property that is not visible from a public location (ex. a sidewalk). Obv. IANAL and…
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Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#24I have a stealth startup that designs privacy first solutions to share coarse data about what is inside of rooms without disclosing secrets. This is useful for many use cases, from detecting the number of people in a room to other motion sensing devices which are critical for health and human safety. Patents are pending.
That's great! It does feel like cameras generally collect more data than necessary for some purposes. I have a friend who works at Butlr, which uses thermal sensors to detect body heat (and avoid the privacy risks of cameras) - sounds like your startup is in a similar space. I know you mentioned patents pending, but is there anything you can share about your approach?
"Room occupancy sensors" are a common product. Butlr apparently uses a low-rez IR camera, although they avoid calling it that. Passive infrared is common. Millimeter wave is available.[1]
[1] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/IoT-Commercial-People...
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#25> It then set the name of a channel to the results (either 1-person-in-upl or X-people-in-upl), which others could check.
I'm not suggesting you don't do this, but you /could/ setup a speaker to play the classic remix of Steve Ballmer's "developers! developers!" whenever there are >=2 people in the room. On April 1st, of course.
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
What part of this would be illegal? It's just a zigbee door sensor. The only issue I could see is the college getting upset but if anything they'd just say 'take it down'
object detection of people from images is probably what they are referring to. there are maybe some state laws that could be stretched to include that but i would say presumptively legal
The final solution does not depend on object (people) detection. In fact by the end of the article he has totally eliminated the camera
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#27[dead]
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#28I swear to God that all of these CS labs at different unis look the same. I am getting flashbacks of labs in Toronto that looked exactly like pictures in the post
even the physics labs i worked in looked like this
The physics computer lab in Chamberlin Hall at UW in the 90's was a secret treasure trove of idle NeXTstation Turbo machines in an almost always empty room cooled to near refrigeration temperatures. I used to light up at least half of that room to run distributed simulations. There's probably still a 30 year old key to that lab in a junk drawer somewhere.
Eventually I realized that it just made sense to suck it up and get my own hardware, as it was either going to be esoteric "workstation" hardware with a fifth of the horsepower of a Pentium 75 or it was going to be in a room like the UPL jammed with CRT's and the smell of warm Josta.
How do students operate these days? Unless one is interacting with hardware, I'd be very tempted to stay in "fits on a laptop" space or slide to "screw it, cloud instances" scale. Anyone with contact in the last 5 years have a sense of how labs are being used now?
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public university labs are generally public as they're state property (in this particular case, UW Madison is a public state University). Further, recording video or pictures of people in public places is broadly legal in the US. There are only "presumption of privacy" restrictions which apply to places such as bathrooms and private property that is not visible from a public location (ex. a sidewalk). Obv. IANAL and…
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what do you think public mean, they have to belong to Mr. P. Ublic?
Re: Overengineering a way to know if people are in my university's CS lab
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
even the physics labs i worked in looked like this
The physics computer lab in Chamberlin Hall at UW in the 90's was a secret treasure trove of idle NeXTstation Turbo machines in an almost always empty room cooled to near refrigeration temperatures. I used to light up at least half of that room to run distributed simulations. There's probably still a 30 year old key to that lab in a junk drawer somewhere. Eventually I realized that it just made sense to suck it up an…
I can only speak for the UPL, but, yeah, it was a hallmark of labs at the time that one of the benefits you were getting was the equipment. Nowadays, most people just come in with their laptops -- we have a kubernetes cluster for projects, but most of the actual computing equipment is brought in by students when they want to hang