UNDERWAY20
march 2016cruisingworld.comTECH TIPS
ADVERTORIALSix10®
Thickened
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Each tube of Six10 comes equipped with a static mixing wand. Additional static
mixing wands are available in sets of two or twelve.COURTESY OF THE U.S. COAST GUARDM
ayday, mayday, mayday.”
Without a doubt, the most
dreadful words a sailor or emer-
gency responder will ever hear on a radio.
In 2016, the U.S. Coast Guard received
16,343 calls for help, deploying surface and
aviation assets regardless of conditions
and sending personnel into harm’s way.
Unfortunately, 161 of those calls were lat-
er confirmed or suspected of being a hoax.
“Developing a technology to rapidly
identify hoax callers and their location,”
says Cmdr. Kristi Bernstein, of the Of-
fice of Maritime Law Enforcement,
“would improve the ability of search-and-
rescue controllers to identify probable
hoax calls and make informed launch/no-
launch decisions.”
The Coast Guard reminds the pub-
lic that to knowingly communicate false
distress messages puts the lives of sailors
and rescuers at risk and costs taxpayers
millions of wasted dollars, diverting valu-able resources away from other legitimate
operations. It is also a federal offense,
punishable by up to six years in prison,
total restitution of expenses and a fine
of $250,000. But prosecutions are rarebecause prank callers, even serial callers,
are difficult to locate.
To better enable it to locate, identify
and prosecute these prank callers, the
Coast Guard has teamed up with re-
searchers at Carnegie Mellon’s Language
Technology Institute, which has
developed software that uses artificial in-
telligence and machine learning to build a
voice profile of a caller. “Profiling humans
from their voice is a new area of research
in voice forensics that is massively driv-
en by recent advances in AI,” noted Rita
Singh, senior systems scientist at LTI.
The Carnegie Mellon team provides
voice forensics analysis of the hoax calls,
which reveals key biometric and environ-
mental cues, supplying prosecutors with
a voice print, much like a fingerprint, of a
voice like never before. From the recorded
voice they deduce the physical character-
istics of the caller and their environment,
such as ethnicity, age, height, weight, ed-
ucation level, even the type of room the
call was made from.
The Coast Guard hopes to use the sci-
ence of voice analytics to prosecute those
who transmit false distress calls, and that
the publicity will discourage future perpe-
trators of this crime. —Robert BeringerCRACKDOWN ON
HOAX CALLS
Responding to hoax calls costs tax-
payers millions of dollars, puts lives
at risk and diverts assets from true
emergencies.