Man who Tracked Politicians using Phones in Parliament

Artificial Intelligence is rapidly changing the political landscape around us – be it using AI in election campaigns or political parties predicting voter behaviour using data analytics. In fact, parliaments around the world are leaning on AI for their day-to-day activities. Amidst all this, Belgian artist and concept provider Dries Depoorter has taken it upon himself to track politicians who use phones extensively during parliamentary activities. Depoorter has developed a bot named ‘The Flemish Scrollers’ that can detect the faces of ‘distracted’ politicians and tag them on Twitter. 

Analytics India Magazine caught up with Depoorter to understand what propelled him into this. Talking about The Flemish Scrollers, Depoorter said that he had this idea at the back of his mind for a long time. He wanted to do something with the live stream of his government. “Even before this, I had done a lot of projects with cameras that were connected to the internet without a password. Some of these connections would be open, and some secured with passwords. Hence, I use live streams in different art projects to bring awareness to cameras and cybersecurity.”

“Then I found the stream of the Flemish government. It’s a YouTube live stream. Instead of using open cameras, I thought, why not use this one? I knew there was something interesting about this but wasn’t sure how or what to do with it.”

“So, I started coding, and the first thing that I made was able to check if politicians were angry. If a politician did appear enraged, the software saved an image. But while I was building it, I discovered that many people in the government were using their phones all the time during a House in session. And that's how I came up with the idea.”

Depoorter says it’s great to see people from all over the world react positively to his bot. When asked if the software was even legal, he replied it must be. “I have a lawyer, who is specialised in privacy, and before launching any project, I do a legal check with him. Although he has not been able to give me a clear answer on this, I've been doing this for years, and I didn't end up in any trouble so far. So it kind of agrees, I guess.”

How does the bot work? 

“So first, it checks the YouTube Livestream. It checks if a person is using their phone for too long. It tries to find a face using face recognition and then uploads it to Twitter and Instagram accounts, tagging them.” 

When quizzed about the reactions of these politicians, Depoorter replied that they went defensive. “So actually, the press here in Belgium interviewed the politicians about the bots, and they got into defence mode.”

“I was not expecting this. Some went..‘Okay, I was using my phone only for work’, and a few have also sent me threat emails asking me to take the video down. But I don’t intend to do that at the moment. I think it's important that I use it on politicians since they are the decision-makers, and they’ll be the ones to make laws on AI and machine learning. So now the cameras are on them (laughs).”

Depoorter further confirmed that the software was not open source. “I'm afraid people will judge me based on how I write codes (laughs).”

“Actually, I plan to make it open source mainly because I, too, use a lot of open source tools available out there. Also, I feel a need to do this because when I launched the project, I received a lot of emails. And 80% of the emails read, ‘Hey, we have this same problem in our country. Can you make it open source as I think it's vital for my country?’”

“Again, it's not difficult to do that. It's like object protection, checking if there's a phone in the frame, using facial recognition. I mean, I didn’t start writing codes from zero. I use open source too. So I think people can build it easily if they know a bit about software development. You can do that too,” he quipped.

What awaits him?

Depoorter says one of the weirdest emails that he got was from a company that wished to use his software for their organisation. “The case was that they had lots of cameras in the company and wanted to use my software to install the same on their employees, which I thought was pretty scary. They offered me some insane amounts of money for it, but I declined, as this was never about money.”

When asked if the software's accuracy was on point, Depoorter said, “Of course, nothing is perfect. Maybe interesting, but it's obviously not perfect. I haven’t spoken to many people about this as I’m still developing this project. It will, of course, get better in the coming months. Precision-wise, in the future, it will be able to check if a person is scrolling or texting. I have also used another face recognition Live Library, and it looks way better than it was in the beginning.”

Talking about how his software probably changed the camera angle in the Parliament, Depoorter says, “When I launched the program, it was a big thing. There was a lot of press about this in Belgium, and then the day after, the stream was offline for a few hours. I think it’s also nice that the way they filmed the meetings is changed now. So normally, you have these overview shots, and you can see all the people that are listening. But now, what they do most of the time is focus on the speaker,” he concluded.