Across the country, locations have begun experimenting with artificial intelligence to chart holes, lower customers and fight fires. Authorities in San Jose are now using the rapidly expanding technology to identify poor camps.
A light city-owned Toyota sedan with a half-dozen smaller cameras has driven through South San Jose three times since December to capture photos of parked trucks and RVs. Four personal companies developed various AI systems to track whether people were using the vehicles and therefore fed the images into them.
The open-ended pilot program, which is believed to be the first of its kind globally, may immediately identify tent camps and eventually create a lasting fleet of vehicles that travel through the city.
City officials say they are positive that the initiative will help connect poor people with necessary services, shelter, or housing, despite fears that the initiative may result in more camp sweeps and impounded lived-in RVs. According to authorities, the system is not intended to capture identifying images from people’s faces or license plates.
Mayor of San Jose Matt Mahan said,” We’re not interested in people’s personal names when they live abroad.” However, in order to maintain the city’s lived-in vehicles, we do need to know where all of them are.
The system, first made public by , The Guardian, comes as Mahan pushes to “end the age of camps” as people have grown increasingly frustrated with city poverty.
At the mayor’s urging, the City Council agreed earlier this year to , create policies , to , ban RVs near schools, limit large- vehicle parking across the city and establish fresh tow- ahead zones. More than 800 people live in Trailers, according to the area.
At the same time, town officials are devising programs to , walk around 1, 000 poor people from nearby waterways , and into homes. San Jose has an estimated , 6, 300 poor people, about 70 % of whom live outside or in cars. The rest remain in tents.
In addition to responding to camps, San Jose’s pilot programme aims to help determine debris, graffiti, holes and driving transgressions. According to AI authorities and regional homeless advocates, various cities are already using AI for those functions, but San Jose appears to be the first to do so.
After a fire destroyed the house she shared with her father in San Jose’s West San Carlos area last year, Tami Rule moved into an RV park parked close to Highway 87 and Capitol Expressway. People gawk at the images of the plastic bins the pair keeps stacked outside their car, according to Rule, 56, which worries her most about the system.
” But for somebody to know what it’s like to live in a camper”, she said. ” I would n’t mind that”.
Elsewhere in the Bay Area, San Francisco, Oakland, Fremont and Mountain View authorities said they had no programs to use Artificial to observe camps.
However, authorities said it’s not hard to imagine places following San Jose’s result. Next month, Mahan hosted representatives from the White House and local governments across the country for a , online forum , on using AI to improve public service.
Vishnu Pendyala, an AI professor and researcher at San Jose State University, said the technology has “huge potential” for detecting homeless camps. He also made note of the privacy concerns involving the pilot program and other aspiring AI initiatives.
” We have already seen many things being hacked, and many things being misused”, Pendyala said. He pointed to , reports , of Apple contractors allegedly listening to recordings of iPhone users ‘ queries to Siri, a program powered by AI.
According to city and business owners involved in the pilot, protecting people’s privacy is top of mind, at least in part because AI systems were specifically instructed to ignore faces and license plate numbers.
” Whether we like it or not, AI is going to be a dominant technology”, said Khaled Tawfik, San Jose’s chief information officer. We want to take the lead in identifying risk and identifying ways to mitigate it.
Tawfik claimed that during the pilot, his department would n’t disclose any information to other local authorities or the police department, and that any future data or footage would make it difficult to find out who exactly.
According to Tawfik, San Jose launched the program, which is currently limited to South San Jose’s Council District 10 in response to the countless 311 calls it receives annually to report abandoned vehicles, according to Tawfik. He claimed that the city wants to proactively determine which vehicles have residents so that local authorities can send homeless outreach teams.
So far, the pilot has identified lived- in RVs with about 70 % accuracy. It’s recognized lived- in cars correctly only about 10 % to 15 % of the time.
As the AI looks at thousands more images, Masaf Dawood, a vice president with San Mateo-based Xloop Digital, anticipates that number to rise. He claimed this was the first time a city had requested the vehicle’s identification. Xloop Digital’s software looks for markers including litter on the roadway, lines of parked RVs and unexpected objects, such as a coffee maker on a vehicle dashboard.
Despite the technology’s potential, Dawood still anticipates a margin of error. ” I do n’t think we can say, or that we should say,’ Oh, we can be 100 %,'” he said.
Sensen is one of the other businesses that participated in the pilot. AI, CityRover and Mountain View- based Blue Dome Technologies
Todd Langton, executive director of the homeless advocacy group Agape Silicon Valley, worries the program could “turbo charge” the city’s push to move RVs off its streets. According to Langton, towing unhoused people’s vehicles frequently forces them to steal their belongings, valuable documents, or medications, potentially worsening any mental health and drug issues.
Many residents, meanwhile, want the city to take a tougher stance on vehicle and tent encampments. Students at KIPP San Jose Collegiate, a high school in East San Jose,  , pressured city officials , to move forward with the RV ban near schools, saying homeless people have broken into school buildings and left needles on lunch tables.
San Jose officials claim they want to make sure homeless people have safe places to go as they increase enforcement. They point to recent efforts to , build hundreds of tiny home shelters , and open , safe overnight parking lots , with supportive services.
Even so, those solutions are n’t coming fast enough, Langton said. Most people who move through local shelters do n’t find lasting homes because the city still has a severe shortage of affordable housing.
” It’s just a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done”, Langton said.
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