Barbara K Iverson

he key to analyzing video in real time is programming the accompanying analytical software to look for certain cues–a rigid object under soft, flowing clothing, for example–and issue immediate alerts. First, the software must be “trained,” Bregler says. This is done with the help of Internet services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk digital labor marketplace, where participants are paid to analyze and tag video footage based on what’s on the screen. Bregler and his team load these results into a computer neural network—a cluster of microprocessors that essentially analyzes relationships among data—so that the software can eventually identify this activity on its own.