INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Microsoft facial recognition tools just made some significant technological strides, though the timing probably couldn&t be worse.
On
Tuesday, the company revealed in a blog post that its Face API, part of Azure Cognitive Services, can now identify men and women with darker
skin far more successfully than previous iterations of the technology
The updates particularly improve the system recognition capabilities for women with darker skin tones, reducing error rates for
darker-skinned men and women by as much as 20 times and reducing error rates for all women by nine times.
Microsoft stated that it was able
to &significantly reduce accuracy differences across the demographics& by expanding facial recognition training data sets, initiating new
data collection around the variables of skin tone, gender and age and improving its gender classification system by &focusing specifically
on getting better results for all skin tones.&
&The higher error rates on females with darker skin highlights an industrywide challenge:
Artificial intelligence technologies are only as good as the data used to train them
If a facial recognition system is to perform well across all people, the training dataset needs to represent a diversity of skin tones as
well factors such as hairstyle, jewelry and eyewear.&
Microsoft notes that it incorporated bias training, spearheaded by Microsoft Senior
Researcher Hanna Wallach, who specializes in AI fairness, accountability and transparency
Another senior researcher involved in the effort focuses on bias in training data that can result in biased systems, like the
&underrepresentation of darker skinned women that may lead to AI systems with unacceptable error rates on gender classification
tasks.&
While the eradication of bias in tech systems is a noble cause, the potential surveillance and policing applications of facial
recognition in particular gives many critics pause
Microsoft is currently facing a backlash for its relationship with U.S
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), though the company opposed the border separation policy being enacted by the agency.
In January,
Microsoft announced its intentions to move forward in contracting with ICE after securing an Authority to Operate (ATO) from the agency
The Face API within Azure Cognitive Services is part of a suite of tools offered in Azure Government contracts.
&This ATO is a critical next
step in enabling ICE to deliver such services as cloud-based identity and access, serving both employees and citizens from applications
hosted in the cloud,& Microsoft wrote in January.
&This can help employees make more informed decisions faster, with Azure Government
enabling them to process data on edge devices or utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification.&
