same as any other lie detector patent – just gotta be wordy to pass muster

This has no value…
First, people almost always overestimate how far they are in a project. Second, if you have a culture of honesty then you can just ask the project team. Third, there is no subsitute for a good review process.

Is this just a modern version of a crystal ball?

I can’t see how this will really help anything. I worked at MS for years and everyone is stressed. I don’t think measuring the amount of stress of a group will yield valuable results as far as moving projects forward, but sociologically, they may just want to figure out how long an employee will endure stress before they ‘burn out’. This is much more interesting information to a company like MS who depends human resources so much.

This is beginning to get ridiculous. When are people going to start protecting their rights? I want someone to protect the privacy of my brain waves. If all jobs start to require mind reading waivers and your every thought is watched by your boss then where will this end?
We need to start protecting our rights as a public

Those are all things that are currently used by advanced lie detection devices.

This is nothing more then microsoft developing a new military grade lie detector based on pulse, sweat, pupil dialation, resperation rate, and a number of other factors.

This isnt anything new.

This works like the polygraph. Just believe in the lie.

I don’t know if anyone bothered to read the patent. It sure sounds like Clippy on steroids to me.

“I see you are behind on your project, would you like to:
Ask for help from Steve
Notify your manager
blah blah blah”

Why am I not shocked, angry and filled with rage to hear this?

Oh, let me guess. The product number etched onto each component will be “666.”

DOES THIS MEAN I CAN’T CALL SICK ANYMORE….WELL THEY CAN’T TELL IF IM SICK AT HOME OR ENJOYING A NICE SUNNY DAY AT THE BEACH!!

This technology is Big Brother. Here are some other links
about this technology, being able to be sometype of lie
detector of The Dept of Homeland Security called
Project Hostile Intent (PHI).

http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/mg19526166.400?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19526166.400

IMAGINE the scene. You arrive at New York’s JFK airport, tired after a long flight, and trudge into line at passport control. As you wait, a battery of lasers, cameras, eye trackers and microphones begin secretly compiling a dossier of information about your body.

The computer that is processing the data from these hidden sensors is not searching for explosives, knives, guns or contraband. Instead, it is working on a much tougher problem: whether you are thinking about committing a terrorist act, either imminently, or at sometime during your stay in the US. If the computer decides that might be your intention, you will be led off for interview with security officers.

The equipment could also screen passengers as they wait to have their bags checked before boarding, in an attempt to predict when someone is planning to bomb or hijack a plane.

It sounds far-fetched, but this is the aim of Project Hostile Intent (PHI), the latest anti-terrorism idea from the US Department of Homeland Security. According to DHS spokesman Larry Orluskie, the DHS wants to develop systems that can analyse behaviour remotely to predict which of the 400 million people who enter the US every year have “current or future hostile intentions”.

PHI aims to identify facial expressions, gait, blood pressure, pulse and perspiration rates that are characteristic of hostility or the desire to deceive. Then the idea is to develop “real-time, culturally independent, non-invasive sensors” and software that can detect those behaviours, says Orluskie. The DHS’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) suggests that these sensors could include heart rate and breathing sensors, infrared light, laser, video, audio and eye tracking.

PHI got quietly under way on 9 July, when HSARPA issued a “request for information” in which it asked security companies and US government labs to suggest technologies that could be used to achieve the project’s aims. It hopes to test them at a handful of airports, borders and ports as early as 2010 and to deploy the system at all points of entry to the US by 2012.

But experts in detecting when someone is deliberately hiding something and training machines to recognise human emotions, say that the DHS faces huge challenges, and is unlikely to achieve this goal by 2010, if ever. “I can’t imagine they will have any reasonable rates of success with such a system,” says Kerstin Dautenhahn of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, who specialises in teaching robots to understand human intentions. “I have serious doubts that it will be successful,” adds psychologist Paul Ekman of the University of California, San Francisco, an expert in detecting hidden emotions and intentions from human facial expressions.

We already know that people betray their true intentions via involuntary behaviour. In the 1960s Ekman found that even when people are trying to hide it they often reveal what they are about to do, by showing fleeting, involuntary facial expressions known as “micro-expressions” . For example, if for a fraction of a second you bare your teeth, lower your eyebrows and wrinkle your nose, while pretending to smile, you’ve just made the micro-expression for disgust.

Since 2003, the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been using a program called Screening Passengers through Observation Techniques, which relies on micro-expressions. Under SPOT, dedicated “behaviour detection officers”, who are trained to observe and decipher micro-expressions, observe people milling around at airports and discreetly pull aside anyone whose micro-expressions seem suspicious. After starting a casual conversation, they might then pass them on for further questioning, depending on their responses. “We have caught a number of individuals, from drug dealers to money launderers, and a double murderer in one case,” says TSA spokesman Chris White.

A big problem, however, is that SPOT is an expensive, labour-intensive process and is not something a customs official or baggage screener can do in addition to their normal work. “Right now, screeners have typically less than one minute to examine a traveller’s documents and assess whether they are a threat,” says Orluskie. Similarly, the infamous polygraph or lie detector test, used routinely by intelligence agencies across the world when grilling suspects – despite its questionable reliability – is time-consuming and requires an officer’s undivided attention, as suspects must be hooked up to electrodes that measure blood pressure, sweat and pulse.

Enter PHI. With this latest idea, the DHS is hoping to automate the SPOT program, so that computers, not humans, search for micro-expressions, and at the same time beef up the range of bodily signs that can be investigated. Machines will not just look for micro-expressions, they will also attempt to sense whether someone is hiding something. For this they might use a remote-controlled, non-contact version of the polygraph, bouncing lasers or microwaves off a person’s skin, as suggested by the US Department of Defense in 2006. The DHS wants to use remote sensors so they don’t impede the flow of travellers.
Remote sensors will search for bodily signs that someone is hiding something

——————-

http://www.suspectdetection.com/about.html

Link I posted is to the manufacter of the Cogito Detector

Cogito can read your mind
Rooting out terrorists using a host of non-contact sensors might be a long way off, but a hostility detector developed in Israel is much closer to being deployed.

A traveller being grilled by the Cogito detector, the handiwork of Suspect Detection Systems in Tel Aviv, sits inside a kiosk and places their right hand on a sensor that measures blood pressure, pulse and sweat, just like the polygraph test, while answering questions that appear on a screen. The questions are pretty benign, says SDS chief executive Shabtai Shoval, such as “Do you intend to live and work here?” But unlike the polygraph, the point is not to work out whether their answer to that specific question is a lie, but instead to compare their bodily responses to other people’s. “We check their specific reaction to certain questions and see how their polygraph response differs from that of innocent people who have answered before them,” says Shoval.

He says that a would-be terrorist will react differently to an innocent person. “Terrorists know that they are planning an attack. Coming into the country a year before, all they might want to do is learn to fly airplanes. But just having that plan in their mind changes their reaction,” he says. Because the test does not hinge on a display of hostility, which could be produced by someone innocent who is stressed from being in an airport and at the same time might not be displayed by a trained suicide bomber, Shoval says that Cogito is more reliable than PHI. “Take the September 11 hijackers. They did not look nervous on the CCTV footage as they stood in the queue before they ended their lives.”

The US Transportation Security Agency tried out Cogito at an airport in Tennessee last year and has ordered more $200,000 machines for further trials this year. But one problem is that either every passenger is interviewed, which slows passenger flow, or passengers will have to be profiled and a few selected, raising privacy concerns.