Clayton Haliburton's List: Boston Marathon Bombers

• Surveillance video and pictures from the public have made it possible to put a face to the suspected marathon bombers.
• In Baltimore, CitiWatch cameras are placed all throughout various neighborhoods. They watch the streets, they watch the people, and police say if and when something happens, they play a key role in putting together a case.
• “When things aren’t safe, we have a recorded video of exactly what transpired. Sometimes you don’t quite get a perfect image, but more often than not, that video is very helpful in identifying the suspect or at least pointing detectives in the right direction,” said Anthony Guglielmi, Baltimore Police Department.
• “It’s amazing when you have things that come together and work like they did in Boston. Immediately, we were able to put out the images to the entire country,” said Guglielmi.
• “Thanks to surveillance video, private video, even individuals with cell phones, we were able to get some pretty good images of the bombing suspects,” Guglielmi said.

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• A new study published Monday in the journal Arthritis Care & Research looked at how medical response and imaging technologies saved lives and limbs after the Boston Marathon bombings. For the study, researchers at the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) looked at the 264 injuries caused by the bombings and how imagery was used in evaluations and treatments.
• The study concluded that each extremity should be looked at for musculoskeletal, neurological, and vascular damage separately and that the radiography (X-ray) and computed tomography (CT-scan) “should be used liberally to detect foreign objects, to define basic penetration patterns, and assess bony and soft tissue injuries,” the study says.

• An NBC News photo shows a “makeshift AT&T booth” somewhere on the street in Boston where people could charge their phones while trying to get in touch with loved ones. It’s probable that the booth was already set up for the race as a charging station, but it remained up and running in the aftermath long enough for people to make those important calls.
• Google quickly set up a Boston Marathon Explosions link on its Person Finder page so that people could post either information about someone they’re looking for or information about someone they found. The page also has information including a hotline for families of victims, a number for witnesses to report information to the Boston Police, and a link to the Red Cross Safe and Well page.

• • The Boston Police Department sent tweets informing followers that officers were working to stabilize the situation;
   
  • The Massachusetts Emergency Management Association sent tweets advising concerned individuals to try texting friends and family members in Boston because text messages use less bandwidth than calling; and
   
  • Tufts Medical Center used Twitter to provide updates on its patient count and to inform potential patients that anyone needing care should use the facility's emergency entrance
• For example, Google set up a Boston Marathon Person Finder to help people search for or provide information about an individual's status. The tool offers an "I'm looking for someone" button and an "I have information about someone" button
• • The American Red Cross, which promoted the use of its Safe and Well website, which allows people to register that they are safe and check the registration of other individuals;
   
  • The Boston Athletic Association, which provided a runner tracking tool that individuals used after the bombings to look up marathon runners' times and recent locations; and
   
  • The Boston Globe, which created a Google document allowing those displaced by the bombings to request a place to stay and another document allowing local residents to offer a place to stay

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• Instead, the brothers were identified the old fashioned way: The FBI held a press conference, publicized photographs of the suspects, and asked for the public’s assistance. Soon tips started pouring in, including one from the Tsarnaev brothers’ aunt. In the end, it couldn’t have been more low-tech.
• So why couldn’t automated face recognition identify the bombers? What about the human mind makes it so adept at picking a face out of a crowd? And what will it take for computers to match our own ability? The first question is easy to answer, but the other two less so, and they reveal not only the limitations of computers but also of our own understanding of how we recognize a face.
• But once those conditions start to deviate from the ideal—the lighting dims or a subject isn’t looking straight into the camera, for example—accuracy drops significantly. Skewed images, where poses are anything but straight on, is one of the biggest challenges. Accurate face recognition requires reference points so the computer can correct for differences in distance and perspective between images. If one image is tilted relative to another, the computer can eliminate that variation by lining up the reference points. The eyes are the most widely used reference points, in part because they are the easiest for a computer to extract from an image. But they’re also a limitation. “If you cannot locate the two eye points,” Jain says, “that starts causing a problem.”
• Surveillance cameras also tend to record low-resolution video at choppy frame rates, which decreases the amount of image data available for processing. Facial recognition algorithms that the FBI likely employed in the hunt for the marathon bombing suspects had to contend with all of these issues.
• Our own skill in recognizing faces may also be to blame, says John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If we understood more how people did it in an explicit, definable way, you could program it.”
• We know that part of the process involves our minds computing ratios between different features like the eyes and nose, Gabrieli says. These vary from person to person, and while the differences are incredibly small, we excel at the task. We can also compensate for variability introduced by changes in distance, lighting, and expression. “All those things distort those metrics,” Gabrieli says. “It’s that variety, and that subtlety, of the spatial relations of the face that identify an individual that are remarkable about human face perception,”
• People have found it very hard to program into machines or software.”
• Humans, on the other hand, understand the face holistically, Gabrieli says. We don’t break it down into its component parts, analyzing a nose’s size, shape, and color, for example. In fact, we’re terrible when we try to do it that way. “If you show a nose on a face, people do way better at recognizing that nose when it comes back with a face as opposed to the nose by itself,” Gabrieli says. An analogy, he adds, is proofreading. When we’re reading over a passage we just wrote, we’ll often miss typos because we don’t read letter by letter—we understand the word as a whole, every letter simultaneously. “Faces are like that with a vengeance.”
• It suggests that computers could get better at face recognition, too, if we train them enough. Other problems that have stymied automated facial recognition, such as low-resolution footage like that of the Tsarnaev brothers at the Boston Marathon, can easily be solved by technological advances. But even more training and better technology may not be enough to bring computers up to our level. Until we understand exactly how humans perceive faces, there may never be an algorithm that’s as accurate as we can be.

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• Quickly, the authorities secured a warehouse in Boston’s Seaport district and filled the sprawling space: On half of the vast floor, hundreds of pieces of bloody clothes were laid out to dry so they could be examined for forensic clues or flown to FBI labs at Quantico in Prince William County for testing. In the other half of the room, more than a dozen investigators sifted through hundreds of hours of video, looking for people “doing things that are different from what everybody else is doing,” Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said in an interview Saturday.
• Of course, investigators had 2,000 other leads, too, in the form of photos and video that “almost became a management problem, there was so much of it,” said Davis, who led the local piece of the probe, initially from a ballroom at the Westin Hotel where 100 officers and commanders from local, state and federal law enforcement collaborated. The room was equipped with tables for laptops, power strips and, most important, land lines, since cellphones were unreliable in the chaos after the bombing and satellite phones worked only if you stood by a window.
• On an investigative forum of Reddit.com, since removed from the site, users compiled thousands of photos, studied them for suspicious backpacks and sent their favorite theories spinning out into the wider Internet.

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