21–30 of 114 posts
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17615634/amazon-rekogniti... >Reached by The Verge, an Amazon spokesperson attributed the results to poor calibration. The ACLU’s tests were performed using Rekognition’s default confidence threshold of 80 percent — but Amazon says it recommends at least a 95 percent threshold for law enforcement applications where a false ID might have more significant consequences. Presented witho…
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17615634/amazon-rekogniti... >Reached by The Verge, an Amazon spokesperson attributed the results to poor calibration. The ACLU’s tests were performed using Rekognition’s default confidence threshold of 80 percent — but Amazon says it recommends at least a 95 percent threshold for law enforcement applications where a false ID might have more significant consequences. Presented witho…
What percentage of people in the openly available mugshot database were people of colour, and why should that not be relevant?
One of the perennial problems with machine learning is that it has a tendency to intensify pre-existing biases in the system. It's not just that the algorithm tends to reflect biases in the source data, it's that that reflection tends to encourage the people using the system, who generally have some role in creating that source data in the first place, to become even more biased.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17615634/amazon-rekogniti... >Reached by The Verge, an Amazon spokesperson attributed the results to poor calibration. The ACLU’s tests were performed using Rekognition’s default confidence threshold of 80 percent — but Amazon says it recommends at least a 95 percent threshold for law enforcement applications where a false ID might have more significant consequences. Presented witho…
They should rerun this at 95% confidence and see how many mismatches they get, I suspect it will be much lower than the 6.4% they have at 80% confidence, thought it might cost more than the $12.33 they were willing to invest in this hitpiece against rekognition.
The scary part is that people believe "science" because it is created by people who they think are "clever" and thefore not likely to be wrong. How many people have been falsely convicted because "DNA"? 1B-1 odds of a match, "and sir, yet you claim you were not even in the area?". There should be a way of recognising the parts of the science that are basically correct and the parts that are either less reliable, open…
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire
> Many arson investigators, it turned out, had only a high-school education. In most states, in order to be certified, investigators had to take a forty-hour course on fire investigation, and pass a written exam. Often, the bulk of an investigator’s training came on the job, learning from “old-timers” in the field, who passed down a body of wisdom about the telltale signs of arson, even though a study in 1977 warned that there was nothing in “the scientific literature to substantiate their validity.”
> In 1992, the National Fire Protection Association, which promotes fire prevention and safety, published its first scientifically based guidelines to arson investigation. Still, many arson investigators believed that what they did was more an art than a science—a blend of experience and intuition. In 1997, the International Association of Arson Investigators filed a legal brief arguing that arson sleuths should not be bound by a 1993 Supreme Court decision requiring experts who testified at trials to adhere to the scientific method. What arson sleuths did, the brief claimed, was “less scientific.” By 2000, after the courts had rejected such claims, arson investigators increasingly recognized the scientific method, but there remained great variance in the field, with many practitioners still relying on the unverified techniques that had been used for generations. “People investigated fire largely with a flat-earth approach,” Hurst told me. “It looks like arson—therefore, it’s arson.” He went on, “My view is you have to have a scientific basis. Otherwise, it’s no different than witch-hunting.”
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17615634/amazon-rekogniti... >Reached by The Verge, an Amazon spokesperson attributed the results to poor calibration. The ACLU’s tests were performed using Rekognition’s default confidence threshold of 80 percent — but Amazon says it recommends at least a 95 percent threshold for law enforcement applications where a false ID might have more significant consequences. Presented witho…
Could this be down to the people training the algorithm being predominantly middle class white people? It's a pretty well known phenomenon that people are bad at recognising features of people of other races.
If the algorithm is, say, 99.99% accurate on faces that are the same race, gender, and roughly age, and there's 100 faces in there that match those, it'll correctly say no match .9999^100 = 99% of the time. If there's 5000, it's only going to find no match .9999^5000 = 60% of the time.
What percentage of people in the openly available mugshot database were people of colour, and why should that not be relevant?
It's relevant, but not as an excuse to dismiss the problem. One of the perennial problems with machine learning is that it has a tendency to intensify pre-existing biases in the system. It's not just that the algorithm tends to reflect biases in the source data, it's that that reflection tends to encourage the people using the system, who generally have some role in creating that source data in the first place, to be…
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17615634/amazon-rekogniti... >Reached by The Verge, an Amazon spokesperson attributed the results to poor calibration. The ACLU’s tests were performed using Rekognition’s default confidence threshold of 80 percent — but Amazon says it recommends at least a 95 percent threshold for law enforcement applications where a false ID might have more significant consequences. Presented witho…
That's not in https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/faqs/ - while that threshold may minimize false positives, I'm curious if it was in any documentation that the ACLU saw. Or, to the bigger point, is it in any public documentation?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17615634/amazon-rekogniti... >Reached by The Verge, an Amazon spokesperson attributed the results to poor calibration. The ACLU’s tests were performed using Rekognition’s default confidence threshold of 80 percent — but Amazon says it recommends at least a 95 percent threshold for law enforcement applications where a false ID might have more significant consequences. Presented witho…