Visual computational sociology : computer vision methods and challenges

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
Targeted social and economic policies require an understanding of a country's demo- graphic makeup. Thus, countries like the United States spend more than 1 billion dollars a year gathering survey based census data such as race, education, occupation and unemployment rates. In this work, we explore the use of publicly available digital imagery to measure demographics without the high costs incurred by surveys. These results can then be inputs to critical socioeconomic policies. In particular, we apply computer vision methods to 50 million Google Street View images from 200 cities and show that a wide range of characteristics such as income, education levels, voting patterns, race, CO2 emission per capita and other market research results can be accurately inferred from these images. We specifically use fine-grained image recognition techniques to detect and classify approximately 21.8 million cars and use them to predict demographics. One can imagine using multiple objects such as trees, clothes, houses or people themselves to further extend this analysis and improve its accuracy. However, scal- ing these methods to other objects such as trees, clothes, houses or other objects using current supervised methods is infeasible. Fine-grained datasets are notoriously expensive to collect and it is not possible to annotate images of objects in every pos- sible form they can appear in the world. We present scalable methods of collecting synthetic fine-grained datasets and present an attribute based fine-grained domain adaptation method to perform data efficient classification.

Description

Type of resource text
Form electronic; electronic resource; remote
Extent 1 online resource.
Publication date 2017
Issuance monographic
Language English

Creators/Contributors

Associated with Gebru, Timnit
Associated with Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering.
Primary advisor Li, Fei Fei, 1976-
Thesis advisor Li, Fei Fei, 1976-
Thesis advisor Ermon, Stefano
Thesis advisor Gill, John T III
Advisor Ermon, Stefano
Advisor Gill, John T III

Subjects

Genre Theses

Bibliographic information

Statement of responsibility Timnit Gebru.
Note Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering.
Thesis Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017.
Location electronic resource

Access conditions

Copyright
© 2017 by Timnit W Gebru
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND).

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