Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

These days you tend to hear about Russia in terms of its government hacking the US election. But some canny Russian developers have put their skills to something more productive: monitoring the TV appearances of world leaders.

A team of Russian developers have released an AI powered algorithm that tracks all world leaders activities in all media. Based on the information the Verso service analyzes the impact of each President/Prime Minister and shows a rating for them in real-time.

Verso is an experiment to utilise algorithms designed to rapidly recognise faces (even blurry ones) which were developed at Moscow State University,

Once a second the Verso platform takes a screenshot of a set of monitored TC channels. All the faces it detects are run through the computer vision processing, to see if there is one which matches the person the researchers are searching for.

The algorithms it uses are able to tell in milliseconds if a person is at least a 99% match, even with blurred or turned heads. The data it delivers to its site is in real-time....

Why are social networks powerful tools for causes and campaigns? Many times, people begin to engage in activism only after they’ve been attracted by the fun stuff in a campaign — connecting with old friends and sharing photos, for example. When they witness others participating, they’ll be more likely to join the cause. With socializing as the primary draw, it’s become easier for organizers to attract more and more unlikely activists through social media.

But once a campaign reaches its critical mass, activists might think about moving to other platforms made with their needs — especially digital security — in mind. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter will remain standard fare for online activism. But the time is right for niche-oriented startups to create tools that can supplement these platforms. Here are a few worth investigating....