Information & Ethics committee  I'm not sure I have a strong view on the moratorium. I'm certainly attuned to the errors that can arise in these systems, and I tend to focus on those more so than the benefits. It may not be my place to speak for the good people of Canada.

Information & Ethics committee  One of my concerns would be the possibility of misidentification that is then difficult to detect or undo. I think around 100,000 passengers per day travel through Heathrow Airport, so, if we had an accuracy of 99% in that context, we'd be talking about 100 misidentifications per

Information & Ethics committee  We use automatic face recognition as a blanket term, but it can be used in many different applications. Someone mentioned the convenience of unlocking a phone or accessing account details quickly using it privately in a way similar to a password. I think that is a very different

Information & Ethics committee  I would say attention to human operators in the design and implementation of facial recognition systems, transparency and the development of an expert workforce in facial recognition.

Information & Ethics committee  No, I don't think it's too late to act. I think it's important that we act now. We should proceed on the basis of evidence—what we know—and use that evidence to try to accomplish what we want.

Information & Ethics committee  Do you really want a yes or no?

Information & Ethics committee  Not on its own. No.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. Each of us has one face, which has its own appearance. That appearance changes a lot of times, not only over the long term as we grow and age, but also from moment to moment, as viewpoints change, the lighting around us changes or as we change our facial expression or talk.

Information & Ethics committee  There are some general similarities. In both cases, the idea is to take a sample from the world—be it somebody's fingerprint line or their facial image alike—and compare it with some stored representation that you have and that you're expecting will provide a match. The difficu

Information & Ethics committee  I think that's fair to say. We know for sure that different pictures of one person's face can be more varied than pictures of different people's faces. That's the nub of the problem.

Information & Ethics committee  I can't quote a figure, but there are reasons that fingerprint matching can be more reliable in certain circumstances. One of the reasons is that facial appearance changes a lot according to lighting conditions and the distance from the face to the camera lens. Those particular p

Information & Ethics committee  There are patterns of similarity, but there are also striking divergences between the errors that computers and humans make. Dr. Wang mentioned an example of where simply adding glasses to someone wouldn't affect a human perceiver's view of who is there, but seemingly superficial

Information & Ethics committee  One of the benefits of having human oversight as a part of the system is that egregious errors of the type we were just discussing can be fished out and noticed for the errors that they are before being acted upon. For that reason, I think it's important have a human safeguard, b

Information & Ethics committee  Well, I think it's important to distinguish between differences in ability and prejudice. Both exist, but they're independent of each other. Differences in ability to recognize faces reflect the viewer's social diet of faces—that is, the range of facial appearances they encount

Information & Ethics committee  It depends largely on the specifics of the task. In a task in which passport staff who have been trained and have many years' experience in the job are asked to compare live faces presented in front of them against photographed identity documents similar to passports, we typicall