Technology

Whether you&re trying to figure out how many students are attending your lectures or how many evil aliens have taken your Space Force brethren hostage, Wi-Fi can now be used to count them all.

The system, created by researchers at UC Santa Barbara, uses a single Wi-Fi router outside of the room to measure attenuation and signal drops. From the release:

The transmitter sends a wireless signal whose received signal strength (RSSI) is measured by the receiver. Using only such received signal power measurements, the receiver estimates how many people are inside the room — an estimate that closely matches the actual number. It is noteworthy that the researchers do not do any prior measurements or calibration in the area of interest; their approach has only a very short calibration phase that need not be done in the same area.

This means that you could simply walk up to a wall and press a button to count, with a high degree of accuracy, how many people are walking around. The system can measure up to 20 people in its current form.

The system uses a mathematical model to &see& people in the room based on signal strength and attenuation. The system uses off-the-shelf components and they&ve tested it in multiple locations and found that their total accuracy is two people or less with only one Wi-Fi device nearby.

Bodies and objects essentially absorb Wi-Fi as they move around in rooms, allowing the system to find discrete things in the space. Sadly it can&t yet map their position in the room, a feature that could be even more helpful in the future.

How many times have you called into a company, answered a bunch of preliminary questions about the purpose of your call, then found that those answers didn&t make their way to the CSR who ultimately took your call.

This usually is because System A can&t talk to System B and itfrustrating for the caller, who is already angry about having to repeat the same information again. Salesforce wants to help bring an end to that problem with their new Customer 360 product announced today at Dreamforce, the companycustomer conference taking place this week in San Francisco.

Whatinteresting about Customer 360 from a product development perspective is that Salesforce took the technology from the $6.5 billion Mulesoft acquisition, and didn&t just turn that into a product, it also used the same technology internally to pull the various pieces together into a more unified view of the Salesforce product family. This should in theory allow the customer service representative talking to you on the phone to get the total picture of your interactions with the company, thereby reducing that need to repeat yourself because the information wasn&t passed on.

Screenshot: Salesforce

The idea here is to bring all of the different products — sales, service, community, commerce and marketing — into a single unified view of the customer. And they allow you to do this with actually writing any code, according to the company.

Adding a data source to Customer 360 Gif: Salesforce

This allows anyone who interacts with the customer to see the whole picture, a process that has eluded many companies and upset many customers. The customer record in Salesforce CRM is only part of the story, as is the marketing pitches and the ecommerce records. It all comes together to tell a story about that customer, but if the data is often trapped in silos, nobody can see that. Thatwhat Customer 360 is supposed to solve.

While Bret Taylor, Salesforcepresident and chief product officer says there were ways to make this happen before in Salesforce, they have never offered a product that does so in such a direct way. He says that the big brands like Apple, Amazon and Google have changed expectations in terms of how we presume to be treated when we connect with a brand. Customer 360 is focused on helping companies achieve that expectation level.

&Now, when people don&t get that experience, where the company that you&re interacting with doesn&t know who you are, itgone from a pleasant experience to an expectation, and thatwhat we hear time and time again from our customers. And thatwhy we&re so focused on integration, that single view of the customer is the ultimate value proposition of these experiences,& Taylor explained.

This product is aimed at the Salesforce admins who have been responsible in the past for configuring and customizing Salesforce products for the unique needs of each department or overall organization. They can configure the Customer 360 to pull data from Salesforce and other products too.

Customer 360 is being piloted in North America right now and should GA some time next year.

Twitter says itgoing to change the way it creates rules regarding the use of its service to also now include community feedback. Previously, the company followed its own policy development process, including taking input from itsTrust and Safety Counciland various experts. Now, it says itgoing to try something new: itgoing to ask its users.

According to announcement published this morning, Twitter says it will ask everyone for feedback on a new policy before it becomes a part of Twitterofficial Rules.

Itkicking off this change by asking for feedback on its new policy around dehumanizing language on Twitter, it says.

Over the past three months, Twitter has been working to create a policy that addresses language that &makes someone feel less than human& & something that can have real-world repercussions, including &normalizing serious violence,& the company explains.

To some extent, dehumanizing language is covered under Twitterexistinghateful conduct policy, which addresses hate speech that includes the promotion of violence, or direct attacks or threats against people based on factors like theirrace, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.

However, there are still ways to be abusive on Twitter outside of those guidelines, and dehumanizing language is one of them.

The new policy is meant to expand the hateful conduct policy to also prohibit language that dehumanizes others based on & their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target,& says Twitter.

The company isn&t soliciting user feedback over email or Twitter, however.

Instead, it has launched a survey.

Available until October 9 at 6:00 AM PT, the survey asks only a few questions after presenting the new policylanguage for you to read through.

For example, it asks users to rate the clarity of the policy itself on a scale of one to five. It then gives you 280 characters max & just like on Twitter & to suggest how the policy could be improved. Similarly, you have 280 characters to offer examples of speech that contribute to a healthy conversation, but may violate this policy & Twitterattempt at finding any loopholes or exceptions.

And it gives you another 280 characters to offer additional feedback or thoughts.

You also have to provide your age, gender, (optionally) your username, and say if you&re willing to receive an email follow-up if Twitter has more questions about your responses.

Twitter doesn&t say how much community feedback will guide its decision-making, though. It simply says that after the feedback, it will thencontinue with itsregular process, which passes the policy through a cross-functional working group, including members of its policy development, user research, engineering, and enforcement teams.

The idea to involve the community in policy-making is a notable change, and one that could make people feel more involved with the definition of the rules, and therefore & perhaps! & more likely to respect them.

But Twitterissues around abuse and hate speech on its network don&t really stem from poor policies & its policies actually spell things out fairly well, in many cases, about what should be allowed and what should not.

Twitterproblems tend to stem from lax enforcement. The company has far too often declined to penalize or ban users whose content is clearly hateful in its nature, in an effort to remain an open platform for &all voices& & including those with extreme ideologies. Case in point: it was effectively the last of the large social platforms to ban the abusive content posted by Alex Jones and his websiteInfowars.

Users also regularly complain that they have been subject to tweets that violate Twitter guidelines and rules, but no action is taken.

Itinteresting, at times, to consider how differently Twitter could have evolved if community moderation & similar to the moderation on Reddit or even the moderation that takes place on open source Twitter clone Mastodon & had been a part of Twitterservice from day one. Or how things would look if marginalized groups and those who are often victims of harassment and hate speech had been involved directly with building the platform in the early days. Would Twitter be a different place

But thatnot where we are.

The new dehumanization policy Twitter is asking about is below:

TwitterDehumanization Policy

You may not dehumanize anyone based on membership in an identifiable group, as this speech can lead to offline harm.

Definitions:

Dehumanization: Language that treats others as less than human. Dehumanization can occur when others are denied of human qualities (animalistic dehumanization) or when others are denied of human nature (mechanistic dehumanization). Examples can include comparing groups to animals and viruses (animalistic), or reducing groups to their genitalia (mechanistic).

Identifiable group: Any group of people that can be distinguished by their shared characteristics such as their race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, serious disease, occupation, political beliefs, location, or social practices.