I am a Technology Fellow at Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) where I work on technology-policy with a focus on algorithmic decision making, surveillance, data rights, and privacy. Previously I was a researcher at TU Darmstadt where I worked on applied cryptography, privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) and Internet infrastructure security.
Climbing up the spiral staircases of Notre Dame de Paris used to be a special experience 1. What made the climb on those narrow and steep staircases special? The view. The chimeras looking over Paris. The Eiffel Tour and Sacré-Cœur Basilica in the distance.
We make many decisions during our lifetime. Some more consequential than others. Some that rely on too few choices. Some where we are overloaded with choices.
There are times when we make a decision and move on. Then there are others when we go back to a decision and regret the road not taken. To decide, what kind of choices do we have?
The European Union is regulating artificial intelligence (AI) systems under incorrect assumptions that could result in undesirable outcomes. The EU is assuming more data is always useful to AI and incentivising “big data” approach.
AI is not restricted to data-hungry techniques. There are several alternative techniques that rely on less data, require less computation and less memory. They are more in line with the principle of data minimisation in the GDPR. The Commission should take a smarter approach and incentivise AI techniques that require less data, that benefit society and that assists with climate change mitigation.
We spend much of our life waiting. We wait for someone. We wait for something.
We often wait. But, not all waits are made the same. Waiting for the train that we take every weekday morning is not the same as waiting for a friend to arrive. We know how long we have to wait for the train to arrive. At least approximately. We may not know when the friend will arrive if they are already late.
There are other times when the wait is longer. When you are waiting to receive the reviews for the first academic article you submitted to a conference or journal. When you wait for the approval of a visa application and don’t know whether it will be approved. We know how long we need to wait and yet, we are anxious.
In Agnès Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), we see Cléo wait 90 minutes[^1] for her medical test results. She suspects that she might have cancer. In the beginning, we see her wait anxiously. She asks the opinion of a tarot card reader, shops with her assistant, practices a song with a composer who comes to her apartment and has a superficial afternoon chat with her lover.
This post is an edited version of my Twitter thread from 3 November 2021.
On 2 November 2021, Facebook announced that they will delete the data and shut down the facial recognition system on Facebook.
Which data is being deleted? Facebook’s blogpost does not say that they will delete the models that were generated using the data. It also does not say that they will not use people’s image data to train models. It only says “we will delete more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates.” Is deleting templates enough?
What are these templates? Templates are not images. Templates are generated using images. To understand how templates fit into a facial recognition system, it can be useful to understand the different steps involved in a template-based facial recognition system [^1]. Here is a simplified version of the steps involved: