Big brother is watching you!

20

October

2017

This blog post discusses the advancements in facial recognition software and how they are being used by China to surveillance its population.

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Over the previous decade an increasingly big number of pictures have become available through the rise of social media. Due to this huge amount of data available, many different facial recognition algorithms have been developed, leading to a high accuracy when detecting faces. While such features are best known to many due to features embedded in Facebook, there is multiple other uses next to suggesting which friend you should tag in a picture. Especially, within the security departments around the world, facial recognition has become an increasingly important topic.

China has for instance announced that it is currently building a facial recognition database containing pictures and information of every Chinese citizen. The project was first launched in 2015 and aims to obtain a 90% accuracy rate when recognizing faces. The total pictures in this database would accumulate to 13 Terabyte of data. This information will be combined with another database (90 Terabyte) of more general information and according to official sources, will be used to find fugitives. Furthermore, in recent years China has installed over 20 million surveillance cameras which can be used to recognize faces and track individual movements. The vast surge in surveillance technology in combination with the advancements in facial recognition software have multiple severe implications for individuals in China. First of all, to consider the advantages it should be pointed out that movement and individual tracking can be used to actively predict and prevent crime. Minorty report you think? But the reality is that UK researches have already developed such systems (Link in the references). Furthermore, the collected data could be used in order to improve efficiency in how people commute by being better able to analyse movement flows within a city.
However, a system of total surveillance can also be abused by controlling and monitoring people. No political system is save from power abuse and monitoring everyone can be seen as an impediment to freedom and a risk to democracy. If every opposing thought and action is monitored, it can also be shut down before it gains traction. Consider what would have happened during the Arabic spring if key figures would have been shut down very early on. Even if no action is taken and people are just passively monitored this can have a big impact on the behavior of people. Just think about the different conversations you have for instance in a tram full of people compared to in your own apartment. Lastly, given that this database has a relatively small size of only 13 Terabytes, there is always a risk that this database can be compromised and abused by third parties. With today’s technology, this amount of data can fit on a pen drive.

While this technology is pioneering in China where there are often less concerns about privacy, it is sure to also be further implemented within the European Union. It is therefore important to actively discuss the implications of such a surveillance system.

Lastly, here are some interesting additional facts in regards facial recognition in China. The reading can be found at the end.

– It is now possible to pay in some KFC stores only with a facial scan.
– Some companies in China give beautiful people a discount, based on the symmetry of their faces
– You can enter a university or board a plane through automatically facial recognition.

Some questions to the reader:
What are the implications for our life of such technologies?
Do you think it will become standard to that companies will advertise to us based on the things we do every day? Will Google for example start setting up cameras to better understand its users and then subsequently target people based on what they do offline as well?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2951012/The-CCTV-detects-crime-happens-Minority-Report-style-analyses-crowd-movements-alert-police.html
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2115094/china-build-giant-facial-recognition-database-identify-any
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2101061/shanghai-adopts-facial-recognition-system-name-shame-jaywalkers
http://www.scmp.com/tech/start-ups/article/2109321/alipay-rolls-out-worlds-first-smile-pay-facial-recognition-system-kfc
http://www.scmp.com/tech/start-ups/article/2109321/alipay-rolls-out-worlds-first-smile-pay-facial-recognition-system-kfc

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/29/170469038/in-china-beware-a-camera-may-be-watching-you

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Technology of the Week – Disruption of the book industry – (Group 37)

29

September

2017

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Information Goods – Technology of the Week – Group 37

Advancements in the information technology have had a huge impact on many different industries, such as the book, the movie and the music industry. These industries all have one thing in common: they sell information goods. You don’t buy a book for the ink and paper it has, but for the information you can get reading it.

In our research, we looked at 3 parts: first, at how the book industry has evolved, second how technological changes have disrupted business models and impacted stakeholders and last what we can expect from the industry in the next years.

The disruptive innovation in the industry came up with the release of the Amazon Kindle. With its revolutionary E-ink displays, the E-reader was easier to carry and all of a sudden, it was possible to carry up to 4000 books in your pocket. Also, this made buying books more attractive because the reader had now access to more than 10x the number of books through online stores. Due to this, the whole industry has shifted and different business models started to evolve, such as flat rate subscriptions and pay-per-page models.

In order to analyze the industry evolution, we decided to use Porter’s five forces to describe how the power of the stakeholders have evolved over time.
• Writers now have higher bargaining power, since the competition among publishers has increased and self-publishing has become a more effective way to get to the market.
• Consumers now have more book options to choose from and more platforms on which they can search for books, which increases their bargaining power.
• Given the ease of self-publishing, standard publishers struggled to retain their market share, due to reduced entry barriers. Furthermore, since creating platforms on the internet is relatively cheap and easy, an increased competition has further reduced their bargaining power.
• On the one hand, the switching costs have increased, because E-books can be published in different file formats, some of which are unique to a certain E-reader. On the other hand, the presence of new substitutes, such as audio books, have increased the possibility of diversifying the market.

In terms of possible future evolution of the industry, based on recent development and evolution of the market, we forecast two major possible trends:

First is the fact that the physical book industry will not die. Surprisingly, nowadays a book is still more likely to be sold as physical-, rather than a digital copy. This is because a large group of people still appreciate the experience of buying a book, talking to the library staff to receive suggestions, touching the book or seeing its cover.

Second, thinking about how much time people spend driving a car, cooking or showering, we predict that audio books will gain a large market share in the long term. This particular kind of book gives value to that time and thanks to devices such as Google Home and Alexa, this is even easier than it used to be.

The video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aifQ8UhH8A&feature=youtu.be

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Lie to me – Try beating THIS AI’s job interview questions – or how to get into Goldman Sachs!

16

September

2017

5/5 (9)

In its first, yet intriguing opening scene of the popular TV show ‘Lie to Me’, the main character heroically saves a church from blowing up, by reading a prisoner’s body language and micro-expressions to find the truth about the bomb’s location.

Check out the scene here:

The main character of this TV-show is based on Dr. Paul Ekman, a psychologist and expert on body language and facial expressions at the University of California. Dr Erkman explains that it takes sophisticated technology and years of training in order to master the skills needed to read such micro expressions. However, these micro expressions do not seem to be tied to culture or ethnicity but seem to be rooted in biology. A skill that might also be very useful in a job interview.
With the vast advances AI technology over the last years, it has become more common place for computer programs to be able to recognize pictures, voices, objects and predict behavior based on it. Just to give some examples, think of Facebook’s AI that asks you to tag your friends in pictures or Amazon’s Alexa. Alongside these advances much behavioral analysis has been done on various available data sets. A Stanford research group for instance, managed to judge personality traits better than friends with as little as little data as 10 Facebook likes (The article can be found here). Even the sexuality of people can be predicted with a high accuracy purely based on pictures taken from the internet (Link). It might be alarming to some that a computer program can predict who we are so accurately. However, especially in the recruitment space such technology could save a lot of time and money.
Exactly this is the space that the innovative, US based, startup HireVue has entered. HireVue provides a digital interviewing system that uses video interviews to assess the ability of candidates. Behind the system – a powerful AI that tracks your eye movements, the level of stress in your voice, the language you use and in total over 15.000 traits to identify top performers. This promising technology has already been adapted by many large firms including J.P Morgan and Goldman Sachs. When applying to these companies it is no longer sufficient to send your resume and a letter of motivation. These firms now also ask you to log into the HireVue platform and record yourself while answering a set of questions. This video material is then analysed and based on HireVues technology and the top performing candidates are invited for a second round of interviews. While this might at first seem ‘freaky’ officials at J.P Morgan and Goldman Sachs have pointed out clear advantages of using this technology in their hiring process. First, using the software is much more scalable and allows these banks to interview many more people. Second, by eliminating the human beings from the interviewing process any form of human bias is taken out of the hiring process which could be great for avoiding discrimination.
But how does an HireVue interview look like in practice?
In the case of Goldman Sachs applicants can expect 5 questions for which each they will get 30 seconds to prepare themselves and 2 minutes to speak to the camera. The software is very strict with the time limits and does not give any second chances. If everything goes well the interview is over within 15 minutes and candidates can expect to hear back within 2 weeks. (If you are curious what kind of questions can be expected at these check out this article.

In conclusion, in the future we can expect AI to impact many areas of our day to day life, including the hiring process. It might, at first seem that programs such as HireVue decrease discrimination and allow for more diversity in the hiring process. However, we also have to keep in mind that these AIs learn from the data that we chose to input. In my opinion, this leads to two problems. First, if ‘top performer traits’ are always only assessed based on historical data, a company might be slow to adapt itself to changing ‘top performer traits’. Second, within 15.000 different personality traits it will be increasingly difficult to understand all the different correlations. This could also lead to some form of discrimination, this time however, it is more difficult to find someone who is accountable.

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