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Apple Card, Technology and Bias
It is a story that has made its way into all the major news outlets. When tech entrepreneur David Heinemeier Hansson applied for an Apple Card his credit limit was 20 times higher than that extended to his wife Jamie even though they share all their financial accounts, she has lived longer in the US and has a higher credit rating.
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Fair Loss: Margin-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Deep Face Recognition
This post is a review of the paper “Fair Loss: Margin-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Deep Face Recognition” which was presented at ICCV 2019.
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Encryption
It all started with a blog post with the alarming title “The Encryption Debate Is Over - Dead At The Hands Of Facebook”, where the author stated that Facebook’s efforts to “move a global mass surveillance infrastructure directly onto users’ devices” would allow it to circumvent the protections of end-to-end encryption. Scary stuff.
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Face Recognition in Bars?
Each day seems to bring another application of face recognition technology. In one of the more recent news, a UK company has developed a face recognition-powered queueing systems for bars. A webcam above the bar films the crowd of people waiting to order their drinks and the system, named A.I. Bar, uses face recognition to keep track of a virtual queue: the barman sees on a screen who to serve next and a customer-facing screen above the bar shows numbers next to customers’ faces indicating their position in the queue.
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Stories About AI
Last week I was talking with friends and the conversation turned to AI and how we feel its impact. Someone had heard the rumour that Facebook is listening to our conversations and showing us ads based on the content. Now, this particular rumour is not true. Besides questions of legality and creepiness, it is simply infeasible, even for a company as large as Facebook, to analyse the speech of all its users in real time. The necessary computational cost far exceeds any potential revenue that could be made from the resulting ads. This does not mean that the rumour is easy to kill, because there is always someone whose friend was once talking about visiting Australia and, lo and behold, they started seeing ads about Australia.