An Algorithm That 'Predicts' Criminality Based on a Face Sparks a Furor

In early May, a press release from Harrisburg University claimed that two professors and a graduate student had developed a facial-recognition program that could predict whether someone would be a criminal. The release said the paper would be published in a collection by Springer Nature, a big academic publisher. With "80 percent accuracy and with no racial bias," the paper, A Deep Neural Network Model to Predict Criminality Using Image Processing, claimed its algorithm could predict "if someone is a criminal based solely on a picture of their face." The press release has since been deleted from the university website. Tuesday, more than 1,000 machine-learning researchers, sociologists, historians, and ethicists released a public letter condemning the paper, and Springer Nature confirmed on Twitter it will not publish the research.