A New Program Judges If You're a Criminal From Your Facial Features

Like a more crooked version of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, a new machine learning paper from a pair of Chinese researchers has delved into the controversial task of letting a computer decide on your innocence. Can a computer know if you're a criminal just from your face? In their paper'Automated Inference on Criminality using Face Images', published on the arXiv pre-print server, Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang from China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University investigate whether a computer can detect if a human could be a convicted criminal just by analysing his or her facial features. The two say their tests were successful, and that they even found a new law governing "the normality for faces of non-criminals." They described the idea of algorithms that can match and exceed a human's performance in face recognition to infer criminality "irresistible".