General Intelligence
The authors of the image dataset that changed the world have made one long-overdue tweak
ImageNet is arguably the most important dataset in recent A.I. history. It’s a collection of millions of images that were compiled in 2009 to test a simple idea: If a computer vision algorithm had more examples to learn from, would it be more accurate? Were the underperforming algorithms of the day simply starved for data?
To encourage others to test the same hypothesis, the authors of ImageNet started a competition to see who could train the most accurate algorithm using the dataset. By 2012, results from the academic competition had attracted the full attention of tech industry giants, who began…
In the early 1800s, the Maryland Jesuit order of priests owned hundreds of enslaved people, forcing them to work on plantations and profiting off their sale. A 2016 New York Times exposé showed that in 1838, to keep the struggling Georgetown University alive, the priests shipped 272 enslaved people to the notoriously brutal plantations in the Deep South.
Now, the Jesuits have begun to atone. A new Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation has been created in conjunction with descendants of those the Jesuits enslaved, funded with an initial $15 million. The Jesuits have pledged a total of $100 million to…
A DIY device that won’t hand your data over to Amazon, Google, or anyone else
I like the idea of having a security camera, but there are two drawbacks to most of the options on the market. They either send video to the cloud, meaning you’re not in control of that data and typically have to pay a monthly fee, or they cost more than I want to pay.
Recently I found a fun, DIY solution: the ESP32-CAM. The ESP32 is a microcontroller, which is a small computer usually meant to run a single program. The chip has been licensed and built into tons of configurations, like boards with built-in LCD displays and GPS modules…
Black tech workers are speaking out against the industry’s “diversity theater,” the practice of preaching diversity and equity while punishing internal advocates, Sidney Fussell writes in Wired.
Workers at Pinterest…
General Intelligence
States still haven’t matched Illinois’ 2008 biometric privacy law
Though most Americans have likely never heard of it, Illinois’ 12-year-old Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has proven itself to be the country’s strongest legal barrier against the unfettered collection of fingerprint, iris, voice, and facial recognition data.
Other states have taken notice. California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) included biometric data in its broad set of privacy protections when it went into effect in 2020, and just last week Virginia passed its own data privacy act, which experts say is largely modeled on California’s. …
From critically acclaimed live performances of The Lion King to Beat Battle rooms where 21 Savage, Wiz Khalifa, and Drake judged work from fledgling producers, Clubhouse owes its “unicorn” status and social clout to its Black users, Keith Nelson Jr writes in LEVEL.
“For Black celebrities who are often used for the clout of their popularity and rarely the nuance of their personality, Clubhouse offered a rare gift: the power to choose who to engage with, and about what,” Nelson writes.
But now the platform has a choice to make. Will it recognize how important Black users are to its…
General Intelligence
The team purposely excluded Instagram images from the European Union, likely because of GDPR
OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.
Facebook researchers announced a breakthrough yesterday: They have trained a “self-supervised” algorithm using 1 billion Instagram images, proving that the algorithm doesn’t need human-labeled images to learn to accurately recognize objects.
Typically, the most accurate image recognition algorithms require humans to label images as containing dogs, horses, people, or any other subject, and then the algorithm can find similarities between images humans have indicated contain the same objects. Facebook’s chief A.I. scientist Yann LeCun has been on a mission to change…
The program turns neighbors into agents of the surveillance state
One of China’s largest and most pervasive surveillance networks got its start in a small county about seven hours north of Shanghai.
In 2013, the local government in Pingyi County began installing tens of thousands of security cameras across urban and rural areas — more than 28,500 in total by 2016. Even the smallest villages had at least six security cameras installed, according to state media.
Those cameras weren’t just monitored by police and automated facial recognition algorithms. Through special TV boxes installed in their homes, local residents could watch live security footage and press a button to summon police…
General Intelligence
International regulators have found Clearview AI’s technology breaches their privacy laws
OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.
Clearview AI plans to challenge an Illinois law guarding against private facial recognition databases in the Supreme Court, according to Bloomberg Law.
The Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has been a thorn in the side of tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Apple for years, as it prohibits the collection of data like facial recognition images, fingerprints, and iris scans without explicit consent. Workers at conglomerate Del Monte Foods even used the law to challenge a facial recognition time-clock system.
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General Intelligence
People’s facial expressions line up with their emotions less than half the time
OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.
Facial recognition isn’t just for verifying a person’s identity. In recent years, researchers and startups have focused on other ways to apply the technology, like emotion recognition, which tries to read facial expressions to understand what a person is feeling.
For instance, Find Solution AI, a company based in Hong Kong that was recently featured in CNN Business, is selling its technology to schools and colleges, where it scans students’ faces and monitors their feelings in virtual classrooms. …
Dave Gershgorn
Senior Writer at OneZero covering surveillance, facial recognition, DIY tech, and artificial intelligence. Previously: Qz, PopSci, and NYTimes.
