{"id":9108,"date":"2017-09-06T06:45:05","date_gmt":"2017-09-06T14:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/06\/news-2881\/"},"modified":"2017-09-06T06:45:05","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T14:45:05","slug":"news-2881","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/06\/news-2881\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Will Soon Identify Protesters With Their Faces Partly Concealed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Louise Matsakis| Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2017 14:03:11 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

Protesters regularly wear disguises like bandanas and sunglasses to prevent being identified, either by law enforcement or internet sleuths<\/a>. Their efforts may be no match for artificial intelligence, however. <\/p>\n

A new paper<\/a> to be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops<\/a> (ICCVW) introduces a deep-learning algorithm\u2014a subset of machine learning used to detect and model patterns in large heaps of data\u2014that can identify an individual even when part of their face is obscured. The system was able to correctly identify a person concealed by a scarf 67 percent of the time when they were photographed against a “complex” background, which better resembles real-world conditions.<\/p>\n

The deep-learning algorithm works in a novel way. The researchers, from Cambridge University, India’s National Institute of Technology, and the Indian Institute of Science, first outlined 14 key areas of the face, and then trained a deep-learning model to identify them. The algorithm connects the points into a “star-net structure,” and uses the angles between the points to identify a face. The algorithm can still identify those angles even when part of a person’s mug is obscured, by disguises including caps, scarves, and glasses.<\/p>\n

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Image: University of Cambridge\/ National Institute of Technology\/ Indian Institute of Science<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The research has troubling implications for protestors and other dissidents, who often work to make sure they aren’t ID’d at protests and other demonstrations by covering their faces with scarves or by wearing sunglasses. “To be honest when I was trying to come up with this method, I was just trying to focus on criminals,” Amarjot Singh, one of the researchers behind the paper and a Ph.D student at Cambridge University, told me on a phone call.<\/p>\n

Singh said he isn’t sure how to prevent the technology from being used by authoritarian regimes in the future. “I actually don’t have a good answer for how that can be stopped,” he said. “It has to be regulated somehow \u2026 it should only be used for people who want to use it for good stuff.” How to guarantee algorithms like the one Singh developed don’t get into nefarious hands is an ongoing problem.<\/p>\n

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a writer at The New York Times<\/i>, discussed the dubious implications of the algorithm described in the paper on Twitter: “too many worry about what AI\u2014as if some independent entity\u2014will do to us. Too few people worry what *power* will do *with* AI,” she wrote in a tweet<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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