NewScientist (4 June 2016) reports on a reputedly new technology, by a company named Faception, that … well, it sounds like the latest version of phrenology. Implementing some standard facial recognition technology, it then proceeds to this:
The controversial part is what happens next. Faception maps these features onto a set of 15 proprietary “classifiers” that it has developed over the past three years. Its categories include terrorist, paedophile, white-collar criminal, poker player, bingo player and academic. To come up with its custom archetypes, Itzik Wilf, Faception’s chief technology officer, says the system was trained on the facial features of thousands of images of known examples. The software only looks at facial features, he says, and ignores things like hairstyle and jewellery.
Since the facial bones characterize the look of the face, phrenology is spot-on. They claim successes, but from the descriptions they do not seem statistically significant; indeed, they sound like mind-readers’ tricks. Their final claim,
“This is a new idea,” Wilf says. “New ideas are often greeted with friction.”
Rings all sorts of warning bells in my mind.
