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"The report cited a recent academic analysis of studies on how people interpret moods from facial expressions. That paper found that the previous scholarship showed such perceptions are unreliable for multiple reasons."

"Having mastered facial recognition for humans to an alarmingly precise degree, even picking out wanted criminals from huge crowds, Chinese tech whizzes are turning their attention to furrier faces. "We've been using it for sheep, pigs and cows," said Zhao Jinshi, who studied at Cornell University and founded Beijing Unitrace Tech, a company developing software for the agriculture industry."

"The battle over algorithms in healthcare has come into full view since last fall. The debate only intensified in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which has disproportionately devastated Black and Latino communities. In October, Science published a study that found one hospital unintentionally directed more white patients than Black patients to a high-risk care management program because it used an algorithm to predict the patients' future healthcare costs as a key indicator of personal health. Optum, the company that sells the software product, told Mashable that the hospital used the tool incorrectly. "

"The results are unfortunately not surprising - countless studies have shown that facial recognition is susceptible to bias. A paper last fall by University of Colorado, Boulder researchers demonstrated that AI from Amazon, Clarifai, Microsoft, and others maintained accuracy rates above 95% for cisgender men and women but misidentified trans men as women 38% of the time."

""The concern is, are the Chinese extra-territorialising their surveillance state? You could make a case that they are when other countries are using technologies like Hikvision that they use on their own citizens. They can now do globally," said James Lewis, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Hikvision has rebutted those concerns and said there is no evidence that surveillance collected in other countries using its cameras has ever been sent to Beijing."

"Over the years critics have pointed out their many shortcomings as well. Perhaps the biggest flaw of all is that the laws are vague. If machines become so human that we find it difficult to tell them and us apart, how will a machine tell the difference? Where does humanity end and artificial intelligence begin? And even if an AI can distinguish itself from a human being, we also cannot know what loopholes and reprogramming a robot is capable of. Surely an AI more clever than us could plan a way to access its core and bypass any of its existing limitations."

"The software, 4 Little Trees, was created by Hong Kong-based startup Find Solution AI. While the use of emotion recognition AI in schools and other settings has caused concern, founder Viola Lam says it can make the virtual classroom as good as - or better than - the real thing. Students work on tests and homework on the platform as part of the school curriculum. While they study, the AI measures muscle points on their faces via the camera on their computer or tablet, and identifies emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear. "

"Empirical evidence for this is beginning to appear. A recent large-scale study by the National Bureau for Economic Research in the US, using data from more than 3 million workers, found that the number of meetings per person had gone up 12.9% and the number of attendees per meeting increased by 13.5% during the pandemic. The researchers also found "significant and durable" increases in length of the average workday - up 8.2%, or 48.5 minutes - along with short-term increases in email activity."

"After spending hours studying FAQ pages, sending terse emails and making occasional phone calls in an earnest-if-naive attempt to take back some control of my personal information online, I had my first demoralizing moment."

"There are currently no usable photo data sets of mask-wearing people that can be used to train and evaluate facial recognition systems. The NIST study addressed this problem by superimposing masks (of various colours, sizes and positions) over images of faces, as seen here:"

"Recent studies concluded that the smoothness of a tablet screen leads to an alteration of handwriting features, whereby the impact on graphomotor execution varies according to the level of the writer's handwriting skills"

"As part of her undergraduate research, Alice Xue studied whether a machine could pass a Visual Turing Test by producing images that people cannot tell were made by a machine. Xue trained an algorithm using 2,192 traditional Chinese landscape paintings collected from art museums. The resulting AI-generated paintings were mistaken for being made by humans 55 per cent of the time."

"Playing video games can be good for your mental health, a study from Oxford University has suggested, following a breakthrough collaboration in which academics at the university worked with actual gameplay data for the first time."

"One point I found heartening in preparing this data was this quote from one of our data scientists. Following the announcement of a winner, 'Americans applying heart reactions on political content were off the charts, while angry reactions were closer to baseline.' It's possible to have a spike in positivity without having a corresponding spike in negativity. There has been a lot of interest in Facebook's impact on civic discourse and reasonable requests for us to share more data so it can be studied more fully. Obviously, this post is not meant to be a perfect analysis."

"Researchers at Columbia University sought to shed light on the problem by tasking 400 AI engineers with creating algorithms that made over 8.2 million predictions about 20,000 people. In a study accepted by the NeurIPS 2020 machine learning conference, the researchers conclude that biased predictions are mostly caused by imbalanced data but that the demographics of engineers also play a role."

"Thailand continues to embrace advanced technology, announcing that five smaller upcountry airports will pilot a facial recognition system to reduce lines, speed immigration procedures, and increase safety. Should the pilot project prove successful, it would be scaled up nationwide. "Currently, travelers may be required to show their ID cards or passports up to three times in one trip through an airport," said Deputy Transport Minister Thaworn Senneam."

"Thailand continues to embrace advanced technology, announcing that five smaller upcountry airports will pilot a facial recognition system to reduce lines, speed immigration procedures, and increase safety. Should the pilot project prove successful, it would be scaled up nationwide. "Currently, travelers may be required to show their ID cards or passports up to three times in one trip through an airport," said Deputy Transport Minister Thaworn Senneam. Officials expect the new system will eliminate the need for immigration police officers to inspect passports. As the number of tourists and business travelers has been steadily increasing over the years, immigration lines at Thailand's major airports have grown longer, causing inconvenience to visitors and inspiring some complaints. The new system will also benefit Thais, as they must also present national identification cards at airports under the current system. Under the new system, travelers "can have their faces scanned just once at check-in counters and then board a plane without the need to show their ID cards, passports or boarding passes," Thaworn said. The five airports that will participate in the pilot project are Krabi and Surat Thani airports in the South, and Udon Thani, Ubon Ratchathani, and Khon Kaen airports in the Northeast. Not all aspects of the system have been ironed out. A panel is being formed to study the new identification system with representatives from the Department of Airports, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Royal Thai Police. They plan to work out synchronize their databases, which store information on Thai and foreign travelers."

"North America, Central America, and Caribbean In the U.S., a 2016 study showed that already half of American adults were captured in some kind of facial recognition network. More recently, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled its "Biometric Exit" plan, which aims to use facial recognition technology on nearly all air travel passengers by 2023, to identify compliance with visa status."

"Facebook disabled our personal accounts, obstructing the research we lead at New York University to study the spread of disinformation on the company's platform. The move has already compromised our work - forcing us to suspend our investigations into Facebook's role in amplifying vaccine misinformation, sowing distrust in our elections and fomenting the violent riots at the US Capitol on 6 January."

"Twitter has admitted it amplifies more tweets from rightwing politicians and news outlets than content from leftwing sources. The social media platform examined tweets from elected officials in seven countries - the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Japan. It also studied whether political content from news organisations was amplified on Twitter, focusing primarily on US news sources such as Fox News, the New York Times and BuzzFeed."

"Growth, then, is the animating ideal behind the platforms these companies build, and 'persuasive technology' is the means of achieving this. The research this technology is built on draws on everything from dopamine studies to behavioural psychology and addiction analysis. Features galore have emerged to keep our attention, from the endless scroll to dark patterns, but one is more important than all others, according to Fisher: recommendation algorithms."