The research could add to China's vast security apparatus, which already includes AI-based "predictive policing". Earlier this year, Beijing hired the China Electronics Technology Group, the country's largest defence contractor, to create an AI that can analyse the behaviour of people in CCTV footage for signs that they're about to commit an act of terror. Once complete, the system will be used to predict "security events" so that police or the military can be deployed in advance. Digital rights experts warned that using AI in this way could be dangerous and that "reaching generalised conclusions from such small data poses huge problems for innocent people". Dr Richard Tynan, technologist at Privacy International, said: "This is no different than Craniometry from the 1800s, which has been debunked. In fact, the problem runs much deeper because it can be impossible to know why a machine has made a certain decision about you. "It demonstrates the arbitrary and absurd correlations that algorithms, AI, and machine learning can find in tiny datasets.