China is already home to extensive facial recognition technology, using it to identify criminals, monitor students' attention, and even let citizens purchase train tickets. Now, in an attempt to enrich its surveillance arsenal, reseachers from the country have developed a 500 megapixel facial recognition camera capable of capturing "thousands of faces at a stadium in perfect detail and generate their facial data for the cloud while locating a particular target in an instant." The AI-based cloud camera service was developed in collaboration between Shanghai-based Fudan University and Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Changchun, according to Global Times. The "super camera" is also said to have the ability to shoot panoramic photos with a clear image of every single human face, something that can be put to use in extremely crowded public spots. The facial recognition system has been designed keeping national defense, military and public security in mind, the report said, adding it could "serve as a watchdog at military bases, satellite launch bases and national borders to prevent suspicious people and objects from entering or exiting."

A shopping centre in Los Angeles has introduced its first robot security guard to patrol the mall to help identify potential shop lifters. The robocop-style guard is capable of picking up video footage and sending information back to security headquarters, so they can respond quickly. It is equipped with a 360-degree camera, WiFi, sensing units and can stream live video, read license plates and detect people. The bot operates autonomously and looks like a cross between a dalek from Doctor Who and the main character in Wall-E. The objective of the machine is to differentiate between a harmless passerby and a possible criminal.

The FBI wants to use artificial intelligence to identify hardened criminals who have obscured their fingerprints by burning or cutting them. For decades this practice has helped offenders escape the law, but now forensic experts hope to create a next-generation system that can't be fooled by the practice. The FBI has issued a request to technology companies across the United States for expert advice to help its Next Generation Identification (NGI) System project. The government agency plans to use artificial intelligence to compensate for the missing portions of the as-yet unreadable fingerprints. The new system will form part of the FBI's massive biometric database.

Before it started scampering after the machine learning chip market in 2016, but after it was founded at the University of Michigan in 2012, Mythic was trying to build embedded chips that would let surveillance drones run software modeled after the human brain. Part of the funding for the company, then known as Isocline, came from the Department of Defense. But after relaunching two years ago, Mythic refocused on embedded devices like autonomous cars and security cameras. Now the company is only a few months from sampling chips based on an aggressively ambitious architecture, which uses analog computing inside flash memory cells to accelerate machine learning tasks like facial recognition. Helping it over the finish line is $40 million raised last month from new and existing investors, including SoftBank Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Lux Capital.

Last year, we learned about the remarkable scale of the FBI's facial-recognition technology, with its access to nearly 412 million photos--many originating from sources unrelated to crime, such as ID documents. The intelligence agency has been trying to create a system that can accurately identify criminals in, say, CCTV footage--though it wasn't then known how well the bureau's software worked, nor whether it actually improved investigations. Now, we have at least a little more insight into the program. The Guardian reports that a House oversight committee hearing last week revealed some interesting new details about the proliferation and abilities of the FBI's facial-recognition systems. First, there is a very good chance that you, as an American, appear within the database. Among those many millions of photos, it turns out, are the likenesses of around half the country's adult population.

An experiment to see whether computers can identify criminals based on their faces has been conducted in China. Researchers trained an algorithm using more than 1,500 photos of Chinese citizens, hundreds of them convicts. They said the program was then able to correctly identify criminals in further photos 89% of the time. But the research, which has not been peer reviewed, has been criticised by criminology experts who say the AI may reflect bias in the justice system. "This article is not looking at people's behaviour, it is looking at criminal conviction," said Prof Susan McVie, professor of quantitative criminology at the University of Edinburgh.

There are supposedly some some serious ethical concerns at play here. For one, 15,000 images from inmates and folks who've been arrested were given to third parties to further test outside algorithms. Many of these tattoos apparently had personally identifying information in the frame along with the ink itself (think: names of loved ones, faces and birthdates). The trial run was based on 15,000 images (Tatt-C), but the next phase (Tatt-E) will be comprised of over 100,000 photos pulled from Florida, Michigan and Tennessee law enforcement and correctional facilities when it starts this summer. The EFF also says that the NIST has unfairly and inappropriately targeted religious groups as part of their study.