NVIDIA's AI may keep watch over smart cities of the future

Artificial intelligence is pushing into every area of our life with deep inroads to our mobile devices, our video games, and even our own brains. Video surveillance could the next step if NVIDIA's new video analytics platform, Metropolis, is successful. The initiative, announced just ahead of the annual GPU conference this week, will use learning AI to analyze the massive amount of data from surveillance video for "public safety, traffic management and resource optimization." According to NVIDIA, there are already hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras around the globe, with the number expected to rise to the 1 billion mark by 2020. Human beings have a hard time sifting through the flood of moving images, storing the majority of it on hard drives for later viewing.