By Scott Donaldson and Edward Holthaus. View full conference schedule at postfrontiersconference.com.

An orderly, lawful populace is essential to any functioning democracy.

How do we balance the 1st Amendment’s rights to assembly and free speech with this imperative? In this paper, we present a possibility for safe crowd control via automated vehicles. Through supervised learning based on training data of herding, we develop a spatial algorithm that can be implemented in self-driving vehicles. With a baseline algorithm, further testing can be performed in the field — after sporting events, during parades, and amidst demonstrations — in order to determine the efficacy of the algorithm, particular with respect to safety for law enforcement officers.

Our research group operates out of the Kalanick Center for Automation at Carnegie Mellon University, with additional funding from Governor Peduto’s PA Tech Forward initiative and the Department of Homeland Security.

Secret Device for Remote Locations

Does your lifestyle prevent you from qualifying for insurance discounts?
Do you lack sufficient time for exercise or have limited access to sports facilities?
Maybe you just want to keep your personal data private without having to pay higher insurance premiums for the privilege?

Unfit Bits provides solutions.

In this project, we — Lucas Ochoa, a junior studying design, and Scott Donaldson, a master’s student in computational design — create a piece that simulates the suspense, tension, and psychological stresses of Russian roulette.

While the focal point of the piece is the 3d printed physical form resembling an oversized revolver chamber, we also significantly altered the environment and experience around the object in order to heighten the drama. Rather than introducing and describing the piece in a speech, we distributed a bureaucratic form to all the participants containing a disclaimer as well as possible “dangers” of the piece (both real and fantastical). Printed in Courier New and featuring an unidentifiable, corporate-seeming logo, the pseudo-legalese of the form served to distance our selves from the project — to make it appear the work of some faceless corporation with questionable motives and little to no regard for the actual safety of the participants. The date and time were hand-written in the blanks on the page — even corporations are prone to human error. The form appears below:

After reading the form, participants were asked to wait in a queue outside the room housing the project — the Martha Orringer Conference Room. We were fortunate to have pliable, willing participants for this. Lucas acted as the guard to the room, holding a box containing the marbles which he dispensed to participants before they entered the room.

No cameras were permitted inside the Martha Orringer Conference Room. However, we commissioned the following illustrations to depict what the experience might have been like:

A circuitry diagram may be found at the right.

Although it has been known to induce madness in anyone who views it, the project code is available on GitHub.