China, the European Union, and the United States have been in the news about strategic plans and policies on the future of AI. The July 2 AI Matters policy blog post was on the U.S. National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan, released in June, as an update of the report by the Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence of The National Science & Technology Council. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the AI Roadmap Website.
Now, a Center for Data Innovation Report compares the current standings of China, the European Union, and the United States and makes policy recommendations. Here is the report summary: “Many nations are racing to achieve a global innovation advantage in artificial intelligence (AI) because they understand that AI is a foundational technology that can boost competitiveness, increase productivity, protect national security, and help solve societal challenges. This report compares China, the European Union, and the United States in terms of their relative standing in the AI economy by examining six categories of metrics—talent, research, development, adoption, data, and hardware. It finds that despite China’s bold AI initiative, the United States still leads in absolute terms. China comes in second, and the European Union lags further behind. This order could change in coming years as China appears to be making more rapid progress than either the United States or the European Union. Nonetheless, when controlling for the size of the labor force in the three regions, the current U.S. lead becomes even larger, while China drops to third place, behind the European Union. This report also offers a range of policy recommendations to help each nation or region improve its AI capabilities.”
Month: August 2019
About Face
Face recognition R&D has made great progress in recent years and has been prominent in the news. In public policy many are calling for a reversal of the trajectory for FR systems and products. In the hands of people of good will – using products designed for safety and training systems with appropriate data – society and individuals could have a better life. The Verge reports China’s use of unique facial markings of pandas to identify individual animals. FR research includes work to mitigate negative outcomes, as with the Adobe and UC Berkeley work on Detecting Facial Manipulations in Adobe Photoshop: automatic detect when images of faces have been manipulated by use of splicing, cloning, and removing an object.
Intentional and unintentional application of systems that are not designed and trained for ethical use are a threat to society. Screening for terrorists could be good, but FR lie and fraud detection systems may not work properly. The safety of FR is currently an important issue for policymakers, but regulations could have negative consequences for AI researchers. As with many contemporary issues, conflicts arise because of conflicting policies in different countries.
Recent and current legislation is attempting to restrict FR the use and possibly research.
* San Francisco, CA and Somerville, MA, and Oakland, CA, are the first three cities to limit use of FR to identify people.
* “Facial recognition may be banned from public housing thanks to proposed law” – CNET reports that a bill will be introduced to address the issue that “… landlords across the country continue to install smart home technology and tenants worry about unchecked surveillance, there’s been growing concern about facial recognition arriving at people’s doorsteps.”
* The major social media companies are being pressed on “how they plan to handle the threat of deepfake images and videos on their platforms ahead of the 2020 elections.”
* A call for a more comprehensive ban on FR has been launched by the digital rights group Fight for the Future, seeking a complete Federal ban on government use of facial recognition surveillance.
Beyond legislation against FR research and banning certain products, work is in progress to enable safe and ethical use of FR. A more general example that could be applied to FR is the MITRE work The Ethical Framework for the Use of Consumer-Generated Data in Health Care, which “establishes ethical values, principles, and guidelines to guide the use of Consumer-Generated Data for health care purposes.”