Essentially, it's machine-learning-powered software that can use the front-facing camera on a smartphone to pick out faces, identify anyone who isn't the owner, and if they are gazing at the screen, alert the user that there's someone behind them snooping on their texts or web browsing, and so on, all in real time.The Googlers' work on this technique – which appears to be just an academic project at this stage rather than an upcoming feature – will be presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference next week in California. more
Sony and a few other companies were working on this about seven years ago. (see the patent)
