BBC Reports on Shareholder Vote Amazon on Rekognition

Shareholders vs government regulation.   Intriguing details from the UK, where advanced camera surveillance is ubiquitous.  Advanced automation of these systems will quickly follow.

Amazon defeated Rekognition revolt by a large margin
By Leo Kelion,    BBC Technology desk editor

An attempted shareholder revolt over Amazon's sale of facial recognition technology to the police mustered less than 3% of votes cast at the firm's annual general meeting.

The tally was revealed in a corporate filing.

The tech firm had said it was aware of civil rights concerns but had not received any reports of law enforcement clients misusing its Rekognition tool.

Even so, the system is set for further scrutiny.

Last week, Republican and Democrat politicians on the House Oversight Committee raised concerns about the speed at which Amazon's facial recognition facility and others like it were being deployed. ....  "

Face Scanning with Amazon Rekognition

A look at use of Amazon's Rekognition for Police Functions. More on Amazon Rekognition.

Oregon's a Testing Ground for Amazon's Facial Recognition Policing, But What if Rekognition Gets it Wrong?   By The Washington Post 

Police in Washington County, OR, have used a facial-recognition algorithm from Amazon to publicly test new surveillance techniques for more than a year, accelerating criminal investigations based on video footage, but also intensifying debate about the tool's legal ramifications.

Opponents warn police reliance on Amazon's face-scanning Rekognition software could lead to wrongful arrests of individuals who only faintly resemble video images, as well as threatening citizens’ civil liberties and safety.

Rekognition's advantages include easy activation, no need for significant technical infrastructure, and affordability.

Although Amazon advises police to use the algorithm's results only when matches have 99% confidence, Washington County deputies are not shown that metric when they employ Rekognition, receiving instead five possible matches for each search, even if the software's match confidence is much lower.   .... " 

FBI Trying Amazon Face Matching Software from Amazon

Inevitable that such measures will be used by law enforcement and governments.    Or it will only be being used by criminal organizations.  Bias and privacy will have to be considered.  What will the legal considerations for identification be?  Note the quantities of data being used.

The FBI is Trying Amazon’s Facial-Recognition Software in NextGov

The software allows the FBI to go through video surveillance footage much faster than agents can.

The FBI is piloting Amazon’s facial matching software—Amazon Rekognition—as a means to sift through mountains of video surveillance footage the agency routinely collects during investigations.

The pilot kicked off in early 2018 following a string of high-profile counterterrorism investigations that tested the limits of the FBI’s technological capabilities, according to FBI officials.

For example, in the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas carried out by Stephen Paddock, the law enforcement agency collected a petabyte worth of data, much of it video from cellphones and surveillance cameras.

“We had agents and analysts, eight per shift, working 24/7 for three weeks going through the video footage of everywhere Stephen Paddock was the month leading up to him coming and doing the shooting,” said FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Christine Halvorsen.  .... " 

Amazon Rekognition Announces New Features

For a prototype project have been examining applications of face and image analysis.  I see that Amazon has added a number of new features to their Rekognition Services, which is used in Pinterist.

Amazon Adds New Features to Their Rekognition Service  by Steef-Jan Wiggers in Infoq

In a recent blog post, Amazon announced the addition of three new features to its Rekognition Service. These new features enable detection and recognition of text in images, face detection up to a hundred in a full picture, and real-time face recognition across ten million faces.

At Amazon re:Invent 2016, Amazon introduced Rekognition, allowing developers to add image analysis to their applications. Amazon is now making additional investments in this cognitive service with these new features. An early adopter of the Amazon Rekognition service is Pinterest.   .... " 

(will be starting to test, any watchouts?) 

Amazon Rekognition

Impressive tutorial embedded here and information about available face and image recognition services.   This is a place to understand a major piece of where AI has been moving.   And now its all available as a service.  Show this to your computer oriented kids or colleagues.   APIs can leverage you to valuable capabilities.

Amazon Rekognition
Deep learning-based image recognition
Search, verify, and organize millions of images

Amazon Rekognition is a service that makes it easy to add image analysis to your applications. With Rekognition, you can detect objects, scenes, faces; recognize celebrities; and identify inappropriate content in images. You can also search and compare faces. Rekognition’s API enables you to quickly add sophisticated deep learning-based visual search and image classification to your applications.

Amazon Rekognition is based on the same proven, highly scalable, deep learning technology developed by Amazon’s computer vision scientists to analyze billions of images daily for Prime Photos. Amazon Rekognition uses deep neural network models to detect and label thousands of objects and scenes in your images, and we are continually adding new labels and facial recognition features to the service.

Rekognition’s API lets you easily build powerful visual search and discovery into your applications. With Amazon Rekognition, you only pay for the images you analyze and the face metadata you store. There are no minimum fees and there are no upfront commitments. ....   "