Chinese leader Xi Jinping has built a sprawling security system to prevent violent forces from destabilizing society. A new wave of deadly attacks is putting pressure on officials to expand that surveillance state. China was stunned this month by its deadliest act of public violence since a string of terrorism strikes rocked the remote Xinjiang region in 2014. Dozens were hospitalized and 35 killed by the bloody car-ramming in Zhuhai city that was the culmination of a spate of violence this year -- mostly stabbings -- which have sparked nationwide anxiety. Xi responded to spouts of ethnic violence a decade ago by installing a network of facial recognition cameras, tightening Internet controls and expanding a national resident database.

And soon enough, if Clear has its way, it may also be in your favorite retailer, bank, and even doctor's office--or anywhere else that you currently have to pull out a wallet (or, of course, wait in line). The company that has helped millions of vetted members skip airport security lines is now working to expand its "frictionless," "face-first" line-cutting service from the airport to just about everywhere, online and off, by promising to verify that you are who you say you are and you are where you are supposed to be. In doing so, CEO Caryn Seidman Becker told investors in an earnings call earlier this year, it has designs on being no less than the "identity layer of the internet," as well as the "universal identity platform" of the physical world. All you have to do is show up--and show your face. This is enabled by biometric technology, but Clear is far more than just a biometrics company.

If you've ever lost access to a Facebook or Instagram account, you know it can be frustrating to prove that you're really you. Meta is hoping to make regaining access to your account a lot easier and faster by bringing back a technology it recently did away with. Several years ago, Facebook shut down its facial recognition system over privacy concerns. At the time, the company said that the "many specific instances where facial recognition can be helpful" (like automatically tagging you in photos or suggesting tags) didn't justify the fears of someone misusing that data. This week, Meta announced the return of facial recognition.

Facebook and Instagram have a problem. Well, they have many, many problems, but one of the ones they feel like addressing is "celeb-bait ads and impersonation." According to a new post from parent company Meta, the way they're going to try solving this is through the use of facial recognition technology. In the lengthy post, Meta explains that the biggest impact of these new tools will be an expanded effort to stop scam accounts from impersonating celebrities. If you've used Facebook in the last year or so, you've probably encountered friend suggestions for attractive celebrities, which are obvious fakes that can be identified by their paparazzi photos and deliberate misspellings of their names.

The days of Tom Hanks having to issue Instagram warnings about fake AI videos of himself may hopefully be coming to an end. Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is now working on facial recognition techniques to try and curb the rise in "celeb-bait scams", as well as help users recover their accounts quicker. "We're testing a new way of detecting celeb-bait scams," wrote Meta in a blog published on Monday. "If our systems suspect that an ad may be a scam that contains the image of a public figure at risk for celeb-bait, we will try to use facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad to the public figure's Facebook and Instagram profile pictures. If we confirm a match and determine the ad is a scam, we'll block it. We immediately delete any facial data generated from ads for this one-time comparison, regardless of whether our system finds a match, and we don't use it for any other purpose."

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is to introduce facial recognition technology to try and crack down on scammers who fraudulently use celebrities in adverts. Elon Musk and personal finance expert, Martin Lewis, are among those to fall victim to such scams, which typically promote investment schemes and crypto-currencies. Mr Lewis previously told the Today programme, on BBC Radio 4, that he receives "countless" reports of his name and face being used in such scams every day, and had been left feeling "sick" by them. Meta already uses an ad review system which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect fake celebrity endorsements but is now seeking to beef it up with facial recognition tech. It will work by comparing images from ads flagged as being dubious with celebrities' Facebook or Instagram profile photos.

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. will start using facial recognition technology to crack down on scams that use pictures of celebrities to look more legitimate, a strategy referred to as "celeb-bait ads." Scammers use images of famous people to entice users into clicking on ads that lead them to shady websites, which are designed to steal their personal information or request money. Meta will start using facial recognition technology to weed out these ads by comparing the images in the post with the images from a celebrity's Facebook or Instagram account. "If we confirm a match and that the ad is a scam, we'll block it," Meta wrote in a blog post. Meta did not disclose how common this type of scam is across its services.

Meta is fighting the scourge of celebrity investment scam ads with facial recognition technology to detect those who most often have their images used. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced on Monday it would begin trialling the use of facial recognition technology with a select pool of 50,000 celebrities or public figures worldwide on an opt-out basis in December. If Meta's existing systems suspect an ad may be a scam, it would compare the images in the ad against the public figure's Facebook and Instagram profile pictures, and if it's a match and the ad is a scam, it will be deleted. "This process is done in real time and is faster and much more accurate than manual human reviews, so it allows us to apply our enforcement policies more quickly and to protect people on our apps from scams and celebrities," David Agranovich, director of global threat disruption at Meta, told reporters on Monday. The celebrities must have a Facebook or Instagram profile in order to participate in the system.

Meta is bringing facial recognition tech back to its apps more than three years after it shut down Facebook's "face recognition" system amid a broader backlash against the technology. Now, the social network will begin to deploy facial recognition tools on Facebook and Instagram to fight scams and help users who have lost access to their accounts, the company said in an update. The first test will use facial recognition to detect scam ads that use the faces of celebrities and other public figures. "If our systems suspect that an ad may be a scam that contains the image of a public figure at risk for celeb-bait, we will try to use facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad against the public figure's Facebook and Instagram profile pictures," Meta explained in a blog post. "If we confirm a match and that the ad is a scam, we'll block it."

Facial expression and action units (AUs) represent two levels of descriptions of the facial behavior. Due to the underlying facial anatomy and the need to form a meaningful coherent expression, they are strongly correlated. This paper proposes to systematically capture their dependencies and incorporate them into a deep learning framework for joint facial expression recognition and action unit detection. Specifically, we first propose a constraint optimization method to encode the generic knowledge on expression-AUs probabilistic dependencies into a Bayesian Network (BN). The BN is then integrated into a deep learning framework as a weak supervision for an AU detection model.