Amazon Ring introduces AI-powered facial recognition to identify friends and delivery drivers, while privacy advocates warn of surveillance risks despite convenience benefits.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Earlier this year a chilling academic study was published by researchers at Lancaster University and UC Berkeley. Using a sophisticated form of AI known as a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) they created artificial human faces (i.e. They discovered that this type of AI technology has become so effective, we humans can no longer tell the difference between real people and virtual people (or "veeple" as I call them). You see, they also asked their test subjects to rate the "trustworthiness" of each face and discovered that consumers find AI-generated faces to be significantly more trustworthy than real faces.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we live, learn, and work, and this past fall, MIT undergraduates got to explore and build on some of the tools and coming out of research labs at MIT. Through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), students worked with researchers at the MIT Quest for Intelligence and elsewhere on projects to improve AI literacy and K-12 education, understand face recognition and how the brain forms new memories, and speed up tedious tasks like cataloging new library material. Six projects are featured below. Nicole Thumma met her first robot when she was 5, at a museum. "It was incredible that I could have a conversation, even a simple conversation, with this machine," she says.

It's great to spot a familiar face -- and now researchers have'cracked the code' that our brains use to tell one apart from another. Our memories of the faces of people we know focus on key facial features let us recognise them when we meet. Volunteers were asked to rank how closely randomly-created digital faces matched with their memory of the face of a colleague. This process was repeated over and over, revealing key identifying facial features of the colleague being remembered. Computer software analysed the data on these instances of key features to recreate the faces in question.

If you think that freezer door just gave you a second look, you might be right. In their efforts to eliminate marketing misfires in the aisles, more retailers are investing in ways to physically connect with their customers within their stores. From cooler doors that recognize a face to dressing room mirrors that can dim the lights, retailers are investing in artificial intelligence (AI) for one key purpose: to accurately anticipate customer behavior at scale. This was a theme recently of the National Retail Federation's Big Show in New York. Specifically, retailers are using AI, facial recognition and other advanced technologies for their physical tracking capabilities, to make better sense of the factors that influence shopper purchase decisions in real time.

It seems insects might be able to see much more than we previously thought. New research has revealed that both the honeybees and wasps are able to learn achromatic (black and white) images of human faces. Despite having tiny brains made up of just one million brain cells – compared to the 86 billion that make up a human brain – they appear to visually process faces in a similar way to how we do. This is despite them having no evolutionary reason for doing so, writes Dr Adrian Dyer, an associate professor from RMIT University in Australia for The Conversation. Understanding how this developed could help researchers create smarter artificial intelligence, Dr Dyer says.

Researchers have struggled to explain how we can identify familiar faces - or how that process is different from the way we perceive unfamiliar ones. Another question relates to different types of familiarity - for example, if you're looking at the face of a real-life acquaintance, or a celebrity's face that you've seen many times before. But researchers have started unraveling this mystery by working with rhesus monkeys - primates whose face-processing systems are similar to our own -discovering two previously unknown areas of the brain involved in face recognition. Researchers measured the brain activity of rhesus macaques as they responded to pictures of monkeys' faces. Because these areas are located in regions of the brain associated with memory, studying these areas could provide new insights into cognitive processes that go well beyond vision.

Google Photos has started to roll out a host of new sharing features which are largely driven by artificial intelligence. The firm today announced the arrival of Suggested Sharing, a bot that scans for your photos looking for familiar faces to share photos with. And Google also unveiled Shared Libraries, a feature designed to make it easier for you to share scrapbook-style albums with family members and friends. Google Photos is rolling out a host of new sharing features which are largely driven by artificial intelligence. Both new features will appear under the Sharing tab on the bottom right-hand coroner of the Google Photos app.

Boston Dynamics makes a variety of robots, including machines that mimic humans and animals, but has struggled to find a market for them. Boston Dynamics makes a variety of robots, including machines that mimic humans and animals, but has struggled to find a market for them. Boston Dynamics products also include Big Dog's little brother Spot, a complex machine that can walk and trot on four legs like a dog. Their companion robot Pepper, hit the headlines last year, after the Japanese robot refused to share whether it held a desire to rule the world.

It's pretty impossible for humanoid robots to not look creepy, even if it's a familiar face, like Albert Einstein. Hanson Robots unleashed its miniature robot dubbed Professor Einstein at CES this week. It's a 14.5" Wi-Fi-connected robot geared toward educating and entertaining its users with the likeness of the late genius Albert Einstein. The robot pairs and interacts with an accompanying iOS and Android app called the Stein-O-Matic, used to teach science and play games, but can also act sort of like a Amazon Alexa or Google Home by reciting facts, solving problems and giving current weather updates. SEE ALSO: Vinci smart headphones have a friggin' screen on them Hanson Robots teamed up with toy inventor Andy Rifkin as its CTO to create the gaming app that has an IQ level which increases the more you interact with Professor Einstein. While ditching the screen has been a tech trend widely recognized at the largest consumer electronics show in the world this year, Hanson Robots is putting a familiar face to its technology, though we have to admit it's still a little creepy, and that's OK. The robots produced by Hanson Robots are eerily lifelike, and produce a wide range of facial expressions and gestures -- Professor Einstein has over 50. "Our end goal is to make AI very smart and to relate with people well, so by giving it a humanlike form it means that we can teach it more what it means to be human," CEO and founder David Hanson tells Mashable. "It can physically explore the world the way that a baby would, and it can socially explore; learn from people." Hanson Robots breaks down its strategy into three areas: extremely humanlike robots, consumer robots (like Professor Einstein) and its cloud AI, called Mind Cloud, intended to learn from the interactions it has with humans. For people who are a little creeped out by an AI that's learning in their home, Hanson ensured us that its AI is programmed to not learn about your personal life. It's not learning about all the people around the world, but what it is doing is learning from those interaction to generalize, said Hanson. "Your individual robot becomes your personal companion, but the Mind Cloud just sort of generally gets smarter from all those interactions.