Over the last decade, tracking, monitoring, and surveillance technology have advanced significantly to help us quantify and understand human behavior in buildings and cities. Enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), streams of camera footage can be analyzed to identify accidents or security breaches, for example. While several attempts have been made to bring this technology into the mainstream office environment for the security and productivity benefits, these efforts have faced resistance on the basis of employee privacy. However, as public health takes center stage in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic, big players see a new opportunity to establish employee monitoring as a standard tool in the workplace. This month, Amazon began to roll out AWS Panorama, its new machine learning appliance and SDK designed for organizations to bring computer vision (CV) to their on-premises video surveillance cameras. The appliance is a hardware device that adds CV to IP cameras that weren’t originally built to accommodate […]