Face Recognition

According to the US Government Accountability Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's database contains over 30 million mugshots of criminals and ID card images from 16 states. This is just one of many law enforcement databases which also contain further identity information, including fingerprints and text data. With needs to improve investigation times and streamline the task of matching suspect images within a pool of numerous identities, government officials, law enforcement offices, and commercial vendors are researching how AI, specifically computer vision, can be used to improve facial recognition. Through our research, we aim to show insights on how various law enforcement agencies and companies are implementing facial recognition technologies. Readers interested in AI for law enforcement might be interested in our founder's presentation at a joint INTERPOL-UN conference on AI in law enforcement given in the summer of 2018.

Each January, some 4,500 companies descend upon Las Vegas for the psychological marathon known as the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. The 2019 festivities were much like any other. Trend-spotting was the name of the game, and this year's trends ran the gamut: drones, voice-activated home assistants, something called "8K" television. But the most provocative robots were those that claimed to "read" humans faces, revealing our emotions and physical health in a single image. Some were overwhelming if toothless mashups of meme culture and pseudoscience.

Last week a new Facebook challenge went viral asking users to post a photo from 10 years ago and one from today captioning "how did aging effect you?" Now being called the "10-Year Challenge."

There Is a Range of Tasks Your Face Recognition App Can Be Designed to Perform If You Use the Right Face Recognition Methods. The Facial Recognition technology has been one of those, gaining ground fastest over recent years and one that is still, obviously, pretty far from its heyday. Invented to, virtually, enhance, or rather, extend one of the 6 human senses, it is finding new, often, critically important (such as, for example, its role in the war on terror) uses and becoming more wide-spread globally by the day. According to Researchandmarkets.com, the total worth of the global Face Recognition software market is estimated to have constituted some USD 3.85 billion in 2017 and it is predicted to reach USD 9.78 billion in 2023, thus showing a nearly threefold growth. This can only mean that while giving those better equipped with Face Recognition apps an edge and an additional means of control, the rapidly developing Facial Recognition technology is also becoming a competitive factor for businesses in various industry sectors.

A popular meme that has been making the rounds is the 10-year challenge in which people on social media (and primarily Facebook) post side-by-side pictures of themselves, one from a decade ago and a recent photo, to see how they have aged. Some have hypothesized that Facebook started the meme as a sneaky way of feeding data into an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, though the social media giant has outright denied the allegation. "The 10-year challenge is a user-generated meme that started on its own, without our involvement. It's evidence of the fun people have on Facebook, and that's it," Facebook stated in a Twitter post. Let's not gloss over the fact that Facebook has a Twitter account, and is fairly active on the competing social media platform.

The shareholders, who are concerned the technology will infringe on people's civil rights, filed a letter on Thursday to stop the sale of the technology, called Rekognition. Organized by Open Mic, a nonprofit that encourages shareholder activism at tech companies, the letter calls for the prohibition of sales to law enforcement agencies until Amazon concludes "that the technology does not cause or contribute to actual or potential violations of civil and human rights."

Over the past week, the #2009vs2019 meme challenge, alternately known as the #10yearchallenge and #HowHardDidAgeHitYou, has become the latest social media trend ripe for think piece fodder. While the challenge inspired a host of discussions about social media narcissism and gendered norms, author and consultant Kate O'Neill put her own spin on the meme in a tweet raising the privacy implications of posting age-separated photos of oneself on Facebook. The post generated enough buzz and discussion on Twitter that O'Neill expanded it into an article in Wired, in which she argued that Facebook or another data-hungry entity could exploit the meme to train facial recognition algorithms to better handle age-related characteristics and age progression predictions. She noted that the clear labeling of the year in which the pictures were taken, along with the volume of pictures explicitly age-separated by a set amount of time, could be quite valuable to a company like Facebook. "In other words, thanks to this meme, there's now a very large data set of carefully curated photos of people from roughly 10 years ago and now," O'Neill wrote.

It was a sunny day outside, with a hint of spring in the air. I followed Angela, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, down the corridor towards my consulting room in Melbourne. She'd been my patient for several years, but that morning I noticed her shuffling her feet a little as she walked. Her facial expression seemed a bit flat and I noticed she had a mild tremor. I referred her to a neurologist and within a week she was commenced on treatment for Parkinson's disease, but I kicked myself for not picking up on her symptoms sooner.

Amazon investors are turning up the heat on CEO Jeff Bezos with a new letter demanding he stop selling the company's controversial facial recognition technology to police. The shareholder proposal calls for Amazon to stop offering the product, called Rekognition, to government agencies until it undergoes a civil and human rights review. It follow similar criticisms voiced by 450 Amazon employees, as well as civil liberties groups and members of Congress, over the past several months. 'Rekognition contradicts Amazon's opposition to facilitating surveillance,' the letter states. '...Shareholders have little evidence our company is effectively restricting the use of Rekognition to protect privacy and civil rights.

Facial recognition technology has progressed to point where it now interprets emotions in facial expressions. This type of analysis is increasingly used in daily life. For example, companies can use facial recognition software to help with hiring decisions. Other programs scan the faces in crowds to identify threats to public safety. Unfortunately, this technology struggles to interpret the emotions of black faces.