December meetup / Facial Recognition/Clearview AI talk now live
December 14, 2020We wrapped up 2020 programming on Tuesday, December 8 by hosting the December ATO Open Source meetup.
The focus was a topic we've had our eye on a for a while, and one we feel our community should be aware of - facial recognition software, the accompanying privacy concerns, and Clearview AI.
Our speaker was Sam Brice, Software Engineer/Director of Engineering at Two Sigma/NumFOCUS in New York City. Sam did an amazing job by overviewing the Clearview AI system, demonstrating a similar system utilizing open source technology, describing how anyone can protect personal privacy, and wrapped up by discussing some of the larger privacy related issues this sort of system pushes to the surface.
The recording includes ~10 minutes of introductory content, so skip through if you only want the talk and Q&A portion. The entire recording, beginning to end, is just under an hour. And if you only want to watch the talk itself, without the intro and announcements, click here.
What: ATO's Open Source December Meetup
Date of Talk: Tuesday, December 8
Talk Title: Demystifying Clearview Vehicle Tracking with Public CCTV Cameras and Tensorflow
Speaker: Sam Brice, Engineer/Director of Engineering - Two Sigma/NumFOCUS
How to find Sam on the internets:
Twitter | LinkedIn | GitHub
Description: Recently the New York Times published an article about Clearview AI - the secretive company that might end privacy as we know it. Using a database of billions of images scrapped from websites such as Facebook, and Instagram Clearview can track and identify anyone with a web presence. The tool is actively being used by police agencies around the country and many citizens are concerned about its potential for abuse. My talk goes into detail explaining how Clearview's system works by demonstrating a similar system for tracking and identifying cars using public CCTV cameras. I will cover the steps of implementing such a pipeline from collecting training data, to building a neural net model, to tracking the movements of a car in time and space. Lastly I will cover the implications of such a capability on privacy as well as what can be done to protect our privacy today.