Economist, Sept 9, 2017 (II)

choi

Visual Computing  l  The Facial-Industrial Complex; Ever better and cheaper facial-recognition technology is spreading.
https://www.economist.com/news/b ... -better-and-cheaper

Note:
(a) "TOURING the headquarters of Megvii 旷视科技 [from the Web on this company: '人脸识别概率为97.27%，比facebook的97.25%还高'] in Beijing is like visiting Big Brother's engine room. A video camera in the firm's lobby recognises visitors in the blink of an eye. * * * Some of the images they capture are shown on a wall of video called 'Skynet [no Chinese name],' after the artificial-intelligence (AI) system in the 'Terminator' films. * * * Quizzed on the Orwellian overtones of the set-up, YIN Qi 印奇 [出生于安徽省芜湖市; 清华大学姚班学士, 哥伦比亚大学计算机科学硕士], the startup's chief executive, simply remarks that 'this helps catch bad guys.' * * * The firm has come a long way since its founding in 2011 (its name stands for 'mega vision'). More than 300,000 companies and individuals around the world use its face-recognition technology, which is called Face++ [no Chinese name], making it one of the biggest such services.
(b) "the accuracy of facial recognition is rapidly improving, putting it on the same trajectory as speech recognition, which really took off when accuracy improved by a final few percentage points, to almost 100%. 'Most people underestimate the difference between 95% and 99% accuracy—99% is a game-changer,' Andrew Ng 吴恩达 [born in UK in 1976, by parents from Hong Kong; Baidu; naturalized as American], a noted AI researcher, has said about speech recognition."
(c)  "Millions of Chinese already 'swipe' their faces 刷脸 [vs face scan 扫脸] on smartphones to authorise payments."
(d) "SenseTime 商汤科技 [2014- ; headquarters: Hong Kong], another Chinese startup [on facial recognition technology] * * * Megvii's and SenseTime's services are largely founded on good data. They have access to the Chinese government’s image database of 700m citizens, who are each given a photo ID by the age of 16. Chinese government agencies are also valuable customers—more and more of the country's hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras will soon recognise faces."
(d) "Commercial applications, often powered by one of the cloud-computing services, are spreading even faster. On September 1st Ant Financial, a subsidiary of Alibaba, deployed its 'Smile to Pay' [Ant Financial offers no Chinese name, but others say 微笑支付] system for the first time in a physical store: customers at a healthier version of a KFC restaurant, called KPRO [KPro: the first and only one so far, opened in Hangzhou on July 1, 2017; title from the Web {hint: it serves salad): KFC's New Restaurant Looks Nothing Like a KFC], in Hangzhou, can settle their bill by looking at a screen (see picture). Xiaomai 智能便利店小麦铺 [原 小麦便利店; based in Beijing], a chain of convenience stores, has said it will use facial scans when people enter its stores in order to study their behaviour. Several Chinese banks now let users identify themselves at ATMs with their faces.  The West is further behind."

(e) "Others have suggest low-tech defences against sophisticated surveillance systems, such as glasses with hallucinogenic patterns on the frame of the specs."
(i) specs: "pl.n. Informal  eyeglasses; spectacles"
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language. 5th Edition. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2016.
www.thefreedictionary.com/specs
(ii) James Vincent, Magic AI: These Are the Optical Illusions That Trick, Fool, and Flummox Computers. The Verge, Apr 12, 2017.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/ ... ficial-intelligence
("A sticker overlay with a hallucinogenic print was stuck onto the frames of the specs. The twists and curves of the pattern look random to humans, but to a computer designed to pick out noses, mouths, eyes, and ears, they resembled the contours of someone’s face — any face the researchers chose, in fact")
(A) flummox (vt; Did You Known?)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flummox
(B) The Verge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Verge
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