The Face Datasets Powering Biometric Surveillance Technologies
The Face Datasets Powering Biometric Surveillance Technologies
This talk will cover in-depth research from Exposing.ai, a multi-year artistic research project that has stirred controversy over image training datasets; advancing much needed discourse on consent, privacy; and data sovereignty. Since publishing the first research posts in 2019, over a dozen of the most important face recognition datasets were unpublished or retracted by their authors. While some researchers and companies have reacted by avoiding this toxic data, others begun torrenting or sharing offline. What remains are the biometric shards of family photos, portraits, and selfies that will power an unregulated global industry of biometric surveillance technologies in perpetuity. By mapping the origins and endpoints of these datasets the data can be understood as an information supply chain of the AI industry. For more information visit Exposing.ai and try the face recognition dataset search tool at exposing.ai/search.
Speaker bio
Adam Harvey (US/DE) is an artist and applied researcher based in Berlin focused on computer vision, privacy, and surveillance. He is a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University (2010) and is the creator of the VFRAME.io computer vision project, Exposing.ai dataset project, and CV Dazzle computer vision camouflage concept.
This talk is sponsored by the Center for Ethics, Society and Computing (ESC) and the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). ESC is generously supported by the School of Information; the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research; and the Department of Communication & Media in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan.