San Jose invited tech companies to mount cameras on a vehicle in what appears to be first-of-its-kind experiment

Last July, San Jose issued an open invitation to technology companies to mount cameras on a municipal vehicle that began periodically driving through the city’s district 10 in December, collecting footage of the streets and public spaces. The images are fed into computer vision software and used to train the companies’ algorithms to detect the unwanted objects, according to interviews and documents the Guardian obtained through public records requests.

  • Sarmyth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    8 months ago

    Yes and no. San Jose has many many programs to assist the homeless, but some of them are dying in the creeks with flooding. We also have relatively new initiatives for reporting encampment to outreach groups instead of the police.

    Not everywhere is a safe place for someone to settle. It’s one thing to have a person spend the night somewhere, but services like these may help identify encampments that are establishing in areas at risk of flooding etc before they get too entrenched.