AI Facial Recognition - of Rats?

AI Facial Recognition - of Rats!

It's an important step forward in the ongoing battle against this unpleasant pest.

It's said that most people are never more than 6 feet away from a rat. No, I don't meant an errant spouse. I mean rattus norvegicus, the brown rat.

But could you tell them apart? Rats, that is.

It seems that AI facial recognition can. Rentokil is setting up a Facebook for rats. Well, not quite, but you get the picture. It's helping to control them - control, as in kill a few after first mapping their movements and routes to their nests.

We'll never totally exterminate them and why should we anyway? They are model organisms in labs, the Netherlands police have trained them to detect gunshot residue and they can be trained to detect tubercolosis in human sputum samples.

These trained rats belong to a group loosely called 'working rats'.

And in many countries rats are a staple food.

In days of yore they were eaten aboard sailing ships by the crew, nicely nicknamed as 'Millers'. It sounds so much better than 'rat'.

And of course they were the well-known ingredient of ratatouille in Baldric's cooking in a World War 1 bunker (Blackadder Goes Forth).

Rat Facial Recognition

Rentokil and Vodafone have been working on the AI rat recognition technology for over a year. Then Rentokil acquired the Israeli pest control market leader Eitan Amichai in December 2022. This had given Rentokil access to advanced technology. 

Provider of pest control services catering to primar[i]ly in the food, pharmaceutical and hospitality industries. The company offers pest solutions and AI technology-powered self-monitoring, non-toxic rodent trapping systems and other related services, thereby helping big brands with high-end pest control services. - pitchbook.com

Andy Ransom, Rentokil's chief executive, told the Financial Times (paywall): "With facial recognition technology you can see that rat number one behaved differently from rat number three.

"And the technology will always identify which rat has come back, where are they feeding, where are they sleeping, who's causing the damage, which part of the building are they coming from, where are they getting into the building from, whether it's the same rodent that caused the problem last week."

The new system is being piloted by customers including food producers and offices.

The Guardian reported:

The group is targeting "cities of the future" in countries that could soon experience a pest population boom, such as China, India and Indonesia.

"If you can identify which cities are going to have a massive influx of population, you can pretty much conclude that they're going to have significant rodent problems," Ransom said.

Could this be a model for an authoritarian state?

Perhaps, if AI can outwit the rats. 

Rats are clever creatures. In fact, a study reported in the Harvard Business Review suggested that on occasion they could be cleverer than human beings:

Ben Vermaercke and his colleagues at KU Leuven gave two cognitive-learning tasks to lab rats and students.

It suggested that when it came to pattern recognition, rats outperformed homo sapiens. But hang on, isn't pattern recognition what AI facial recognition does? Yes and no.

A more complex brain isn't always a better one. Our theory is that instead of considering the specific data points and trying to find and apply a rule, our rat subjects employed what we call a similarity-based categorization strategy: Does this pattern look like the "good" targets we saw in training?

Vermaercke told HBR "We've done research showing they can tell the difference between a movie that features a rat and one that doesn't."

I wonder if they like Roland.

Other techniques for rat control

In a paper in Science Advances, a research team reported that:

Close inspection of head movements and neural recordings revealed that rats displayed prominent beat synchronization and activities in the auditory cortex within 120 to 140 BPM.

That beat perception and synchronization within 120 to 140 beats/min (BPM) are common in humans and frequently used in music composition.

So there you have it, Rentokil.

Just find the right music and films for rats and they'll turn up in their thousands to watch films, dance and take drugs. 

Lethal drugs.

Artificial Intelligence not required.

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