Author: admin

A patent shows how facial recognition drones could identify you from above

Posted onAuthoradmin

An Israeli biometrics startup called AnyVision with ties to Israel’s military has applied for a U.S. patent on technology that tells drones how to maneuver to capture better facial recognition images of people on the ground. Facial recognition technology has become widely used by law enforcement around the world, but the technology is controversial in part for its accuracy issues, especially when recognizing Black and brown faces. Activists are now calling for ending its use entirely , and police use of facial recognition has already been banned in a host of U.S. cities. The patent application, titled “Adaptive Positioning of Drones for Enhanced Face Recognition,” describes a computer vision system that analyzes the angle of a drone camera in relation to the face of a person on the ground, then instructs the drone on how to improve its vantage point. The system can then send that image through a machine-learning model trained to classify individual faces. The model sends back a classification with a probability score. If the probability score falls below a certain threshold, the whole process starts over again. A future defined by this type of mass surveillance would “obliterate privacy and anonymity in public as we know it,” said Kade Crockford, head of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts who’s led the charge on banning facial recognition in Massachusetts cities, in an interview with Fast Company last year. “Weirdly this is not a hugely controversial issue for voters. People don’t want the government to be tracking them by their face every time they leave their house.” People don’t want the government to be tracking them by their face every time they leave their house.” Kade Crockford As with any patent application, there’s no guarantee the technology will show up in a real product. But it does address a very real technical problem with existing facial recognition systems. Such systems usually process images captured by stationary cameras. Capturing a clear angle on someone’s face, and compensating for bad ones, is always a challenge with these systems. Shooting video from drones that can move around and intelligently zero in on the right angle is a way of taking the chance out of the process. The application, which was originally reported  by  Forbes cybersecurity writer Thomas Brewster, was filed last summer and published by the U.S. Patent Office on February 4. AnyVision , which was founded in 2015, sells artificial intelligence designed to let cameras in retail stores recognize the faces of people on “watch lists” who have been convicted of theft in the past. Read More …

Stitch Fix’s former data chief wants to personalize your food at Daily Harvest

Posted onAuthoradmin

Brad Klingenberg, who oversaw Stitch Fix’s formidable personalization and curation efforts as the company’s Chief Algorithms Officer, is taking on a new challenge: tailoring salads, flatbreads, smoothies, and desserts exactly to your taste at Daily Harvest. The six-year-old company makes easy-to-blend smoothies, veggie-filled harvest bowls, soups, lattes, oat bowls, and healthy desserts that can be made by simply warming them up or popping them in a blender. Customers order Daily Harvest’s offerings by signing up for a weekly or monthly plan and receiving deliveries already portioned and ready to eat. As the company’s first Chief Data Officer, Klingenberg hopes to use the data collected by the company to make its meals even more delicious. At San-Francisco-based Stitch Fix, which Klingenberg joined more than seven years ago as the third person on the now 145-strong data team, algorithms learn people’s preferences over time by getting feedback on the clothes customers receive and purchase and through data on the website. Eventually, the algorithms learn to generate tailored recommendations and even advise vendors on possible clothing alterations. If many customers think a sweater is too short, for example, they might relay that information back to the manufacturer to change the design. “There’s almost no corner of the business that’s not touched by data science in some way,” Klingenberg says. That includes recommending clothes for users’ curated clothing boxes, as well as optimizing buying and inventory, and even developing new clothes Read More …

With a wearable reportedly in the works, Facebook continues a quiet push into health

Posted onAuthoradmin

Every big tech company these days seems to have a health tracker, and now that includes Facebook. Last week, The Information reported that the social networking company is working on a wearable health tracker it’s planning to launch next year. At first glance, it’s unclear why Facebook would invest in a piece of hardware that seems unrelated to its core business. But the company has actually been creeping into the health category for years through a series of projects that haven’t garnered a ton of attention. There are a few reasons why Facebook might want to get into the wearable business. Health aside, Facebook may be keen to put its apps even closer to consumers, and The Information article indicates the watch will have an emphasis on messaging. A tracker could help boost engagement among Facebook’s billions of users by sending them notifications for messages or other health reminders. It could also jump-start Facebook’s purported ambitions to impact public health. But Facebook’s data-mining practices make a foray into healthcare controversial Read More …

What’s really at stake in Apple and Facebook’s war over user tracking

Posted onAuthoradmin

While the PR and media layer of Apple’s dispute with Facebook over user tracking by apps may still be going, at a strategic level the drama’s pretty much over, and it’s looking like Apple won. In a nutshell, Apple will soon require apps that want to track user’s movements within other companies’ apps or websites to get explicit permission to do so from the user. Facebook’s apps have long done this without such explicit permission. When the new feature, which Apple calls App Tracking Transparency , was announced earlier this year, Facebook complained loudly that the loss of tracking data will hurt Facebook—and will hurt small businesses more by reducing Facebook’s ability to carefully target ads for them. Apple said it has a responsibility to its users to give them transparency and choice over the way their personal data is used. Neither of those statements is inaccurate, but they leave little room for compromise. This isn’t the first privacy row between the two companies, but this time it was more heated. Apple CEO Tim Cook condemned Facebook’s business model and implied that it’s designed to profit from misinformation . Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ( reportedly ) said Facebook must “inflict pain” on Apple. But the fact remains that Apple plans to release iOS 14.5, which contains a feature requiring iOS developers, including Facebook, to get permission from users if they want to track said user’s movements across third-party websites and apps. The Apple-Facebook dispute is important for two reasons Read More …

6G internet? Internet pioneer Vint Cerf isn’t buying the hype

Posted onAuthoradmin

Vint Cerf has seen a lot of upgrades to online access since he cowrote the internet’s core Transmission Control Protocol in 1974. So you’ll have to forgive him for a certain glibness in the recap he recently shared of the last 15 years of wireless connectivity: “2G to 3G to 4G to 5G and whatever the heck 6G is.” Yes, 6G. Although 5G wireless broadband is still emerging from a haze of hype , its still largely hypothetical successor was sparking discussion even before President Trump’s February 2019 tweet demanding “5G, and even 6G, technology in the United States as soon as possible.” The “6G and the Future of the Internet” online panel that featured Cerf (since 2005, a VP and the chief internet evangelist at Google) didn’t put 6G in much of a sharper focus. Instead, he used the event hosted by the nonprofit research organization Mitre to suggest two other pieces of technology that play a critical role in the internet’s future: low-Earth-orbit satellites and undersea cables. If Elon manages to get all 24,000 satellites up, in theory it will be impossible to avoid Internet access.” Vint Cerf on Starlink The activation of swarms of low-orbit satellites, Cerf told Mitre Labs chief futurist Charles Clancy, can help address the enormous demand for rural broadband . Meanwhile, the rapid deployment of undersea cables is helping to ensure that no one country can obtain any sort of chokehold on international internet traffic. Cerf said he sees SpaceX’s growing Starlink constellation and other low-orbit systems as a potential breakthrough, thanks to their potential for fast bandwidth, moderate latency, and near-universal access. “If Elon manages to get all 24,000 satellites up, in theory it will be impossible to avoid Internet access because these things, some of them will even be in polar orbits,” he said of SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s ultimate goal for Starlink Read More …