11 recognized faces at Shukhov Lab Winter School
Face recognition System in Moscow
Starting from September 2019 Moscow is introducing face recognition tools into city closed-circuit television (CCTV) system and Moscow metro. As City Government states, multi-million technological project is aimed at increasing safety in the city and faster catch the criminals that are already in the police system. Сameras in the subway will recognize a face, even if a person is in a headdress or glasses. During winter school students learned from tutors of the international Master’s programme ‘Prototyping future cities’ about the ethical, legal and technological limitations in system usage.
What knoweledge participants have gained?
American researcher Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe was a pioneer in face recognition technologies who developed a system that classified photos of faces through a RAND tablet, which was a graphical computer input device. Within the first day of winter school students got a brief introduction into the history of face recognition technologies and their spatial implications from Director of Digital Strategy at Strelka KB Christopher Burman. Vadim Smakhtin, CTO at Habidatum, told about control and use of data in the city while Paulina Smykouskaya, Data Protection Officer at Avito.ru, stated that data protection laws have to grant stronger protection for biometric information because of higher risks to our rights. On the second day participants developed and tested a face recognition spoofing tool under the guidance of Anton Artemchuk, Shukhov Lab leading expert, and Grigory Chernomordik, engineer in Computer Vision at Strelka KB.
*within ‘Prototyping the cities of the future’ track at Winter School of faculty of urban and regional development 2020