One of the earliest tasks that neural networks and Artificial Intelligence could do reliably well was to recognize written numbers. These sorts of number-recognition systems are ubiquitous, as anyone who’s ever had an ATM automatically read the handwritten numbers of a deposited check knows. Megalith is made out of nearly 70,000 handwritten digits that representContinue reading “Megalith”
Category Archives: Training Images
It Began as a Military Experiment
Contemporary research into facial recognition technology began in earnest in the mid-1990s at the behest of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The military wanted facial recognition to exist, so DARPA began funding researchers in computer science and computer vision to work on the problem. The military realized that to do facial recognition, researchersContinue reading “It Began as a Military Experiment”
Excavating AI
This is an article that I co-authored with my friend and collaborator Kate Crawford, who directs the AI Now Institute at NYU. In the article we take a look at some of the bad assumptions and bad politics built into the architecture of the training data used in AI systems.