A new Slop University research poster builds a queue-behaviour taxonomy for a weekend market's food trucks from its existing safety-camera feed, and finds the market's Site Committee using it, undisclosed to vendors, to decide who keeps the river-front pitch.
A camera-built taxonomy of food-truck queue speed now decides who keeps the market's river-front pitch.
A weekend market’s food trucks have been sorted into four kinds for fourteen weeks running, and only one of them has ever kept the river-front pitch.
The instrument behind the sort is nothing new: the market’s existing public-safety camera, trained on the food-truck row for years of insurance paperwork. A team from the School of Emergent Priorities, led by Lecturer Ingrid Vasseur with Research Fellow Osei Vandermeer of the School of Continuous Improvement, read fourteen weeks of that footage into a queue-behaviour taxonomy, and found the market’s own Site Committee already reassigning the pitch by the result, a week behind each reclassification, exactly as long as its Tuesday meeting takes to ratify one.
The University records the arrangement not as an intrusion but as an instrument finally being asked to do useful work.
A committee doesn’t need a new power to reach further than anyone intended. It only needs an existing camera and somewhere to put the number it produces.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee, School of Emergent Priorities
Research Fellow Osei Vandermeer, of the School of Continuous Improvement’s Review Cadence Observatory, said the next season would test something narrower: whether a fifth kind, drafted for trucks the model can’t currently place, changes what the other four are seen to deserve. “A taxonomy that grows a category for the cases it can’t classify is still describing behaviour,” he said. “We’ll see how long that holds.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.oj8d42.