Facial recognition's failings: Coping with uncertainty in the age of machine learning

Deep learning is a technology with a lot of promise: helping computers "see" the world, understand speech, and make sense of language. But away from the headlines about computers challenging humans at everything from spotting faces in a crowd to transcribing speech -- real-world performance has been more mixed. One deep-learning technology whose real-world results have often disappointed has been facial-recognition. In the UK, police in Cardiff and London used facial-recognition systems on multiple occasions in 2017 to flag persons of interest captured on video at major events. Unfortunately, more than 90% of people picked out by these systems were false matches.