So This Is How the "Smart Campus" Begins. Is It a Business, or a Problem?

Ahem, ahem.

Hangzhou No. 11 High School's "Smart Classroom Behavior Management System" has been running for nearly three weeks.

The system is one piece of the school's "Five-Star Project" — smart campus, smart cafeteria, smart classroom, smart management, smart Internet of Things. Here is how it works.

The visible part is two sets of cameras mounted directly above the blackboard, each wrapped in a round housing said to keep their movements from distracting students. The cameras and the school's display screens sit on the same network.

The invisible part uses the faces and movements the cameras capture to analyze, in real time, how closely students are following the lesson. For now the system recognizes six classroom behaviors — reading, writing, listening, standing up, raising a hand, and slumping over the desk — and seven expressions: fear, happiness, disgust, sadness, surprise, anger, and neutral.

Those movements and expressions are converted into three codes, A, B, and C, which are added up into a score. Slumping over the desk, for instance, rates a C. If low codes pile up, the student's name appears on the classroom computer and on the small monitor beside the blackboard. The system also tallies the whole class and shows the result — a "normal face" or a "bitter-melon face" — on the television out in the hallway.

So far the system has been installed in two first-year classes, Class 3 and Class 4, at Hangzhou No. 11 High School (hereafter HZ No. 11). At an event the school held on May 15, "Exploration and Practice for the Future Smart Campus," it was showcased as the school's signature technology.

All of this has already been widely reported. Hangzhou TV, Hangzhou Daily, Zhejiang Daily, Qianjiang Evening News, The Paper, and The Beijing News, among others, led with words like "smart eye" and "black tech" while surveying HZ No. 11's other "smart campus" measures. The school lists many of those articles under the "Media Coverage" section of its official homepage.

Neither as excited as some of the coverage, nor as worried as the rest of it — some students in the pilot classes seem to feel nothing much at all.

One of them said that once the system went in, it rated plenty of high-achieving students a C, and the class concluded that "it's nothing." "It's really inaccurate, so the equipment is still being calibrated — it's basically always being calibrated"; "we don't really look at this thing much"; the teacher "sometimes glances at it after class, but has never called out a student because of it."

To some students in the pilot classes, this doesn't seem all that different from the classroom cameras many other schools already have.

Another student said he wasn't worried about getting caught napping in the afternoon. "That equipment is on sometimes and off other times. When it's off, you can doze."

No one raised privacy, or any other possible effect of the system, unprompted.

Some critics have reached for words like "sky eye" and "telescreen," comparing the "Smart Classroom Behavior Management System" to the surveillance in dystopian novels such as 1984. In an article titled "The Middle Schoolers Scanned by the Classroom's Sky Eye" (《被教室天眼扫描的中学生》), Sohu's outlet Rear Window reported that the head of HZ No. 11's school office answered those voices by saying the media's "misreading" had "seriously disrupted the school's daily teaching."

The Beijing News reported, in a story, that Vice Principal Zhang Guanchao tried to talk down outside fears of "privacy violations." The system does not target individuals, he said; it analyzes behavior management for the class as a whole. What it returns is analyzed data, not raw video. The information it collects sits on a local server rather than in the cloud, so it cannot leak.

A Zhihu user going by "Shushi" — the word means comfortable — added some related detail to a discussion of the HZ No. 11 news: he had seen a similar system being marketed in Hexi, Changsha. He works at a school in Zhuzhou, Hunan, and had planned to buy equipment for an automatic video-recording classroom. A technician from the company with the "highest market share" pushed him toward an upgraded version with video analysis, priced 10% above the standard one.

"Shushi" told QDaily: "We never saw the actual product — there wasn't one locally. All we saw at the time was a PowerPoint deck, and it matched what was in the news. The price depends on how much hardware you pick, how many cameras and so on. Roughly 300,000 yuan per classroom." He was also told the equipment could be used for teaching research and to apply for research projects — "in my view, it's a bonus item for professional title evaluations, the same as publishing papers or placing them in journals."

The company providing the technology for HZ No. 11's system is Hikvision. Founded in 2001 and built on security products, it reached a market value of 360 billion yuan in 2017, passing Sony. Data from 2016 put Hikvision's global share of closed-circuit television (CCTV) and video surveillance at 21.4%, first in the world. Hikvision also supplies the technology behind the currently fashionable facial-recognition systems used to catch jaywalkers.

In 2016, Hikvision released its "AI Cloud" architecture, a package that combines sensing, collecting, storing, and analyzing data. According to the company's 2017 annual report, under this architecture "Hikvision Smart Education provides schools, education bureaus, education groups, and other users with a full range of scenario-oriented smart applications," and the related systems can deliver "recognition and analysis of classroom behavior, attendance statistics, and daily classroom patrols, among other teaching and administrative functions."

Hikvision did not disclose the price of the full system.

QDaily could not reach Hikvision's education products division directly.

The "smart classroom" is not HZ No. 11's first "smart campus" product. On the day it showed off the behavior management system, the school also published a "Middle School Student Nutrition Report", built on data gathered by "Smart Cafeteria 3.0," which it rolled out last year. Through "Smart Cafeteria," students collect their meals by scanning their faces, and parents can log into a back end to see a week of their child's meals. A China News Service report said the project "was developed jointly, against the backdrop of 'Internet Plus,' by the primary and secondary school branch of the Zhejiang Provincial Education Logistics Management Association and Hangzhou Agricultural Products Logistics Network Technology Co., Ltd., as a new-generation service platform aimed at making dietary management in primary and secondary schools standardized, regulated, and digitized."

The "Smart Cafeteria 3.0" news drew more than 100,000 reads on Hangzhou Daily's WeChat official account, held up as an innovative case of big data applied to education. At the time, HZ No. 11 principal Ni Ziyuan told the media: "Paying by face is part of the school's smart-campus building. Technology will not only handle student behavior management — in the future it will be the 'prelude' to precision teaching at the school."

China News Service also unpacked the school's proposal for "face-scan check-ins," saying it could intelligently solve the attendance problems created by the rotating-classroom system under Zhejiang's new college entrance exam rules.

By 2018, HZ No. 11 had gone cardless for daily business like borrowing books and getting through doors.

On May 15, Hangzhou.com.cn wrote in a report: "After more than a year of exploration and practice, HZ No. 11 has taken the lead in folding advanced technology into teaching and management, and has begun to achieve a qualitative leap from humanized life management to modernized teaching and administrative management."

"Smart education isn't actually a very new concept," said He Shanyun, an associate professor at Zhejiang University's College of Education. As she sees it, artificial intelligence got folded into the idea of the "smart classroom" mainly on the back of the AI boom of the past two years, set off by products like AlphaGo.

Technically, before the data can convince anyone, someone has to show that the data, the scores, and actual learning are connected. So far neither the school nor the technology provider has publicly answered several basic questions. Why these six movements and these seven expressions? On what basis are they scored differently? Can one standardized scoring system make room for how differently individuals behave?

"The link between expressions and learning outcomes still needs more study and explanation, in empirical research and in practice," He Shanyun said. She offered the example of a silent student: he says nothing and shows nothing, yet something entirely different may be going on in his head. Existing research cannot support reading such a face accurately.

She also doubts that today's technology can handle the "cultural context" of expressions. "Some peoples are very expressive, and they enjoy showing it, whereas traditional Chinese culture tends to be more reserved about expression." Understanding one person's expressions, in other words, means understanding that person's history. There, machines plainly cannot replace human conversation and judgment.

"I think using new technological tools should be encouraged. But when technology is joined to evaluation and becomes a high-risk, potentially harmful tool, it still has to be used carefully," He Shanyun said.

HZ No. 11's administrators appear to see the system's limits too. According to a report in The Beijing News, the version now running leaves expressions out entirely, and the only behavior scored negatively is slumping over the desk. Which raises a question: does a student with his head on the desk really need a machine to bring him to the teacher's attention?

Zhang Guanchao told The Paper that the trial has already produced positive effects. "Students went from not understanding it and feeling watched, to gradually accepting it and changing their classroom habits on their own. Teachers also analyze students' expressions and behavior in class, to think about changing their teaching habits and make class more enjoyable."

Zhang admitted the equipment is still being calibrated, and said it should reach every classroom over the coming summer holiday. He did not explain which stages or which parameters are being calibrated.

Against the school's claim that students are "changing their habits on their own," a more cautious view stays alert to role-playing. The worry comes down to one question: will people change the way they naturally behave in order to fit a particular technology and set of rules?

Whether that worry comes true, He Shanyun said, depends on what the system is for and how the relationship between system and student is set. If the purpose is surveillance, students are more likely to perform accordingly; if the system only supplies evidence for later analysis of learning, with no rewards or punishments attached, the relationship may stay more natural.

Hu Ling, an associate professor at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics School of Law, agrees: "The school needs to convince parents and students whether or not using this technology bears directly on their evaluations."

That is the point the school has worked hardest to answer in interviews. Zhang stressed that what the system calculates is only for the teacher's reference and "will not be counted toward students' regular evaluations." Yu Yuntao, Hikvision's director for the education industry, also said that the behavioral analysis is only there to help teachers decide.

What cannot be denied is that students under the cameras always know their behavior is being turned into a score for the teacher to see, and that teachers know their class's overall score is turned into a face on the hallway television and on school leaders' desks. Nowhere in the public record is there any sign that the school discussed this with teachers and students beforehand.

Hu Ling suggests looking at all this as a question of power. Surveillance systems built around cameras, he points out, create "an asymmetry of power": "Power is evaluating us, and we have no way to change it." Surveillance, in his view, is a common way of imposing discipline, and watching students in a classroom, employees in an office tower, and prisoners in a prison are at bottom the same thing.

This is a Foucauldian reading. Today's technology, Hu reminds us, is increasingly able to make those different scenes of surveillance one and the same.

The image of the prison leads to a more basic question: how far does technology change, or answer to, the relationship between the educated and the educator — not only how they actually deal with each other, but how they imagine each other?

As a law teacher, Hu does not think the "Smart Classroom Behavior Management System" poses much of a legal problem. "The most basic question is still what we expect education to become. If it's oriented toward exam efficiency, then of course every behavior in the classroom gets cut into fragments, tiered, and scored, with an algorithm judging whether you're a child who loves learning or one who doesn't."

He Shanyun stressed what a classroom is by nature. "The classroom researcher Cazden once said the classroom is one of the most crowded environments in human life. Don't underestimate this space of a dozen-odd square meters, with a few dozen students and one teacher — an enormous amount happens inside it. It can be a simple physical space, but it is also an emotional space, and just as much a space of social relations. Every student who walks into a classroom brings the values of the family he grew up in, the knowledge he already has, and so on... In fact, behind the classroom, all kinds of families, ethnic cultures, and so-called cultural and economic capital are being projected onto it. This space is extremely, extremely complex."

The school in Hunan where "Shushi" works gave up on buying the equipment in the end, because "the leadership thought it cost too much." But the technician told him more than a dozen classrooms nationwide had already installed the system, and that "the rollout has gone smoothly."

Education authorities are pushing systems like this too.

One of the co-organizers of the May 15 event was the Hangzhou Education Technology Center, which reports to the Hangzhou Education Bureau. The "Organizational Structure" page of the Hangzhou Education Network says the center is responsible for "informatization and information-technology education across the city's education system; audio-visual education and educational technology equipment in the city's primary and secondary schools, along with related training services; and the management of government procurement projects for educational equipment across the city."

According to the Zhejiang Provincial Education Technology Center's website, Shengzhou, Shaoxing, and Tongxiang have all held seminars on "smart education" and "smart classrooms" in the past two weeks.

Jiangsu, meanwhile, has written the "smart classroom" into official policy. On May 15, the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Education, the Jiangsu Provincial Economic and Information Technology Commission, and the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Finance jointly issued the Guiding Opinions on the Construction of Smart Campuses in Jiangsu Primary and Secondary Schools (Trial) (《江苏省中小学智慧校园建设指导意见（试行）》). Explaining what a "smart classroom" is, the document requires that "classrooms be equipped with multimedia interactive devices, and that recording-and-broadcasting classrooms supporting online teaching research, along with smart classrooms and learning experience centers supporting the collection and analysis of teaching-behavior data, be built." The Indicator System for Smart Campus Construction in Jiangsu Primary and Secondary Schools attached to the document runs to 21 major categories and 73 sub-items; the "smart classroom" category is worth 6 points, and the item "has a smart classroom that can collect teaching and learning behavior data throughout the entire process, promote personalized learning, and support blended learning" is worth 2.

Fraudsters spotted the opportunity long ago. In June 2017 the Ministry of Education posted a statement saying that people had been impersonating its News Office to run smart-classroom construction projects, and that neither the News Office nor the Ministry's News and Publicity Center had ever run any such project.

By 2017, the number of cameras in China had reached 176 million. Covering schools, companies, parks, streets, train stations, tourist sites and countless other places, they make up a vast security system, and have created a vast security industry. But not every "security" product has anything to do with safety.

On May 9, HZ No. 11 trailed the May 15 public event on its official WeChat account. The article's headline used a piece of startup-world jargon: "The future is already here!"

Photography: Luo Cong / QDaily Cover image: Friman / Wikimedia Banner image: ifage-english-unlimited-advanced