PittPatt I was taking an augmented reality bath

On October 31st, I will do my duty as a citizen and report for jury duty.  Wow, jury duty on Halloween! But, I really don't expect it to be more exciting than usual -- a boring day spent in a smelly room trying to drown out the drone of an overhead TV blaring some kind of daytime pap to which my fellow summonees are positively glued. Thank heavens for my Kindle.

But maybe it will be more exciting. Maybe I'll be impaneled to hear a case in which Mr. Prosecutor presents evidence he gets by using some new and spooky technology.  Specifically, I'm thinking how cool it would be to hear evidence that comes "from the cloud?." How great would that be?

I've been doing technology research for my job and just read a good article in The Atlantic called "Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition is Terrifying." That word -- terrifying -- really grabbed my attention, especially placed right above a grainy black-and-white photo of people with big green boxes drawn around their faces.

It is kind of spooky. Just the cloud by itself is spooky enough when you think about it. So nebulous. So up-in-the-sky. Beautiful but ominous. Now someone's harnessed a little of that cloud-power and has created an "app" (yes, I can download it to my Droid) called PittPatt, which sounds so sweet. Not exactly brand-new, PittPatt (Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition) was created by a bunch of Carnegie Mellon researchers in 2004, and Google bought it this summer. You've probably used this technology yourself. Familiar with "tagging?"

 What's scary, and also somewhat thrilling, is that PittPat can be used to "augment reality" by mining data about our "complementary lives." You just can't make this stuff up. Your complementary lives include the real you (the analog you) and perhaps many virtual yous: the you that you posted on Facebook, the you in your pix on Flickr, the you that's in your friends' pix on Flickr, the you that has a rap sheet, the you that bought a Rubbermaid storage container and duct tape at the Home Depot on Saturday, June 5th at 4:12 p.m., etc. Starting to sound like evidence yet?  

The notion of augmented reality is a bit troublesome though. Sounds like a topic for a Deep Thinking session the next time I get together with my deep-thinking friends.

I think it would be perfectly chillingandthrilling to have Mr. Prosecutor present me with some augmented reality about the complementary lives of Joe Schmoe, our defendant du jour. Irrefutable, right? As Jared Keller sums it up "You may be able to change your name or scrub your social networking profiles to throw off the trail of digital footprints you've inadvertently scattered across the Internet, but you can't change your face. And the cloud never forgets a face.." Happy Halloween!