Researchers Blur Faces That Launched a Thousand Algorithms

In 2012, artificial intelligence researchers engineered a big leap in computer vision thanks, in part, to an unusually large set of images--thousands of everyday objects, people, and scenes in photos that were scraped from the web and labeled by hand. That data set, known as ImageNet, is still used in thousands of AI research projects and experiments today. But last week every human face included in ImageNet suddenly disappeared--after the researchers who manage the data set decided to blur them. Just as ImageNet helped usher in a new age of AI, efforts to fix it reflect challenges that affect countless AI programs, data sets, and products. "We were concerned about the issue of privacy," says Olga Russakovsky, an assistant professor at Princeton University and one of those responsible for managing ImageNet.