With the 2024 Olympic Games fast approaching, some observers will be watching to see whether AI wins any medals. The rapidly expanding tech could be used in a variety of ways in Paris, including but not limited to security. As Le Monde previously reported, the French Parliament has approved a bill that aims to “have algorithms use camera and drone footage to quickly identify potentially dangerous ‘events.’”
In practice, this could look like identifying “crowd surges” or “abandoned packages,” the AP also noted. “The systems combine cameras with artificial intelligence software” to flag these concerns, which are then handled by human operators, according to the news agency, with authorities in France also emphasizing the program would not “involve facial recognition.”
Officials said AI could help prevent an incident such as the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996 or the truck attack that killed over 80 people in Nice in 2016, Reuters reported in March.
“The question is—if we look at the Nice truck bombing, would this have stopped that?” Jason Kent, hacker in residence at Cequence Security, said to IT Brew. “The real question lies in, how are they going to use this data?”
Kent leans toward supporting the use of this kind of tech as long as officials keep their word in not using it for facial recognition.
This year, the Olympics will also partner with Intel, which plans to “create immersive and interactive experiences,” according to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Block ’em. The games, which could attract between 2.3 to 3.1 million unique ticketed visitors to Paris, will also utilize AI to protect 15,000 athletes and more than 2,000 officials from abuse on social media, according to the IOC. “The AI-powered system will monitor thousands of accounts on all major social media platforms and in [over] 35 languages in real-time,” the IOC stated on its site.
Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
From a hacker’s perspective, Kent said a bad actor might view the social media monitoring effort as a challenge, and try to use the technology against itself.
“If I make enough abusive posts, and I use enough positive hashtags, isn’t that hashtag eventually gonna get flagged as an abusive hashtag?” he said. “And you know, if you’re not on top of those mitigations, and changing those rules, pretty soon somebody is going to take a very pro-IOC thing and turn that into the reason that everything’s banned.”
Throwback. This isn’t AI’s first Olympic rodeo. AI was also used, in part, to create the theme song for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, according to a report from the Deloitte AI Institute. And Irish company Orreco utilized the tech to assist more than 100 athletes prepare for the games in Tokyo, according to Silicon Republic. AI also “used data points from sensors and smart wearables to measure heart rate, lung capacity, and movement, among other things, to create a tailored solution for training, rest, and nutrition,” the Deloitte report said.
“One of the three or four things where AI fits in is in training…So, right now, if I have all these different parameters that go into what makes me better, what I watch, what I’m seeing, if my numbers improve, AI is great at that,” Mark McCreary, the chief artificial intelligence and information security officer at Fox Rothschild in New York City, told IT Brew.
“The actual training [with the help of AI] is going to help the athletes and the coaches and the teams crunch those numbers better number one, and number two, find trends that they didn’t know to look for,” he said.