Analysts are warning crypto newcomers that ether shouldn’t be considered merely as a second-best crypto investment after bitcoin.
Read more One of finance’s most colorful personalities joins NLW to discuss how advisers spend their money, Robinhood traders, bitcoin and more.
Read more The National Labor Relations Board today issued a complaint against Google after investigating the firing of several employees last November. The complaint alleges Google violated parts of the National Labor Relations Act by surveilling employees, and generally interfered with, restrained and coerced employees in the exercise of their rights guaranteed by Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.
The NLRB also alleges Google discouraged “its employees from forming, joining, assisting a union or engaging in other protected, concerted activities,” the complaint states.
“This complaint makes clear that workers have the right to speak to issues of ethical business and the composition of management,” Laurence Berland, one of the fired Google employees, said in a statement. “This is a significant finding at a time when we’re seeing the power of a handful of tech billionaires consolidate control over our lives and our society. Workers have the right to speak out about and organize, as the NLRB is affirming, but we also know that we should not, and cannot, cleave off ethical concerns about the role management wants to play in that society.”
Ex-Googlers Berland and Kathryn Spiers previously filed a federal complaint with the NLRB arguing Google fired them for organizing, which is a protected activity. They had organized around a variety of topics, including Google’s treatment of its temporary, vendor and contractor workers, Google’s alleged retaliation against employees who organized, the company’s work with Customs and Border Protection and more.
Additionally, in November 2019, Google put Rebecca Rivers and Berland on leave for allegedly violating company policies. At the time, Google said one had searched for and shared confidential documents that were not pertinent to their job, and one had looked at the individual calendars of some staffers. Following a protest in support of the two, Rivers, Berland, Duke and Waldman were fired.
“Google has always worked to support a culture of internal discussion, and we place immense trust in our employees,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Of course employees have protected labor rights that we strongly support, but we have always taken information security very seriously. We’re confident in our decision and legal position. Actions undertaken by the employees at issue were a serious violation of our policies and an unacceptable breach of a trusted responsibility.”
This comes shortly after the NLRB issued a formal complaint against Google contractor HCL, alleging the company repeatedly violated the rights of unionized workers. Moving forward, Berland and Spiers are hoping the NLRB prosecutes the case against Google and seeks reinstatement and damages for them. But the next step is for the complaint to head to the desk of an administrative judge.
There are now about 50 million people with dementia globally, a number the World Health Organization expects to triple by 2050. Alzheimer’s is the leading cause of dementia and caregivers are often overwhelmed, without enough support.
Neuroglee, a Singapore-based health tech startup, wants to help with a digital therapeutic platform created to treat patients in the early stages of the disease. Founded this year to focus on neurodegenerative diseases, Neuroglee announced today it has raised $2.3 million in pre-seed funding.
The round was led by Eisai Co., one of Japan’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and Kuldeep Singh Rajput, the founder and chief executive officer of predictive healthcare startup Biofourmis.
Neuroglee’s prescription digital therapy software for Alzheimer’s, called NG-001, is its main product. The company plans to start clinical trials next year. NG-001 is meant to complement medication and other treatments, and once it is prescribed by a clinician, patients can access its cognitive exercises and tasks through a tablet.
Neuroglee founder and CEO Aniket Singh Rajput (brother of Kuldeep) told TechCrunch that its first target markets for NG-001 are the United States and Singapore, followed by Japan. NG-001 needs to gain regulatory approval in each country, and it will start by seeking U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance.
Once it launches, clinicians will have two ways to prescribe NG-001, through their healthcare provider platform or an electronic prescription tool. A platform called Neuroglee Connect will give clinicians, caregivers and patients access to support and features for reimbursement and coverage.
The software tracks patients’ progress, such as the speed of their fingers and the time it takes to complete an exercise, and delivers personalized treatment programs. It also has features to address the mental health of patients, including one that shows images that can bring up positive memories, which in turn can help alleviate depression and anxiety when used in tandem with other cognitive behavioral therapy techniques.
For caregivers and clinicians, NG-001 helps them track patient progress and their compliance with other treatments, like medications. This means that healthcare providers can work closely with patients even remotely, which is especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Atlas for Cities, the 500 Startups-backed market intelligence platform connecting tech companies with state and local governments, has been acquired by the Growth Catalyst Partners-backed publishing and market intelligence company Government Executive Media Group.
The San Diego-based company will become the latest addition to a stable of publications and services that include the Route Fifty, publication for local government and the defense-oriented intelligence service, DefenseOne.
The Atlas provides peer-to-peer networks for state and local government officials to share best practices and is a marketing channel for the startups that want to sell services to those government employees. Through The Atlas, government officials can talk to each other, find case studies for best practices around tech implementations, and post questions to crowdsource ideas.
Government contractors can use the site to network with leadership and receive buyer intent data to inform their strategy in the sector, all while getting intelligence about the problems and solutions that matter to state and local jurisdictions across the nation.
“The Atlas delivers on GEMG’s promise to look for companies that complement and supplement the full suite of offerings that we provide to our partners to reach decision makers across all facets of the public sector,” said Tim Hartman, CEO of Government Executive Media Group, said in a statement.
Led by Ellory Monks and Elle Hempen, The Atlas for Cities launched in 2019 and is backed by financing from individual investors and the 500 Startups accelerator program. It now counts 21,000 government officials across 3,400 cities on its platform.
“State and local governments in the United States spend $3.7 trillion per year. That’s almost 20% of GDP,” said Elle Hempen, co-founder of The Atlas. “Our mission to increase transparency and access for local leaders has the opportunity to transform this enormous, inefficient market and enable tangible progress on the most important issues of our times.”
Google is almost running out of AR/VR projects to kill off.
The company announced today in an email to Poly users that they will be shutting down the 3D-object creation and library platform “forever” next year. The service will shut down on June 30, 2021 and users won’t be able to upload 3D models to the site starting April 30, 2021.
Poly was introduced as a 3D creation tool optimized for virtual reality. Users could easily create low-poly objects with in-VR tools. The software was designed to serve as a lightweight way to create and view 3D assets that could in turn end up in games and experiences, compared to more art and sculpting-focused VR tools like Google’s Tilt Brush and Facebook’s (now Adobe’s) Medium software.
Google has already discontinued most of the company’s AR/VR plays, including most notably their Daydream mobile VR platform.
The AR/VR industry’s initial rise prompted plenty of 3D-centric startups to bet big on creating or hosting a library of digital objects. As investor enthusiasm has largely faded and tech platforms hosting AR/VR content have shuttered those products, it’s less clear where the market is for this 3D content for the time being.
Users that have uploaded objects to Poly will be able to download their data and models ahead of the shutdown.
Hulu’s social viewing feature, Watch Party, has now launched to all on-demand subscribers, the company announced today. The co-viewing feature was first introduced during the earlier days of the pandemic in 2020, allowing Hulu users to watch shows together from different locations, as well as chat and react to what they’re watching in a group chat interface on the side of the screen.
Initially, the feature was only made available to Hulu’s “No Ads” subscribers before being tested with Hulu’s ad-supported subscribers in a more limited capacity. To celebrate the Season 2 premiere of Hulu Original “Pen15,” the company had offered the Watch Party experience to its ad-supported customers for 10 days, starting on September 18.
In November, Hulu began testing the Watch Party feature with election news live streams — the first time it had offered co-viewing with its live content.
Today, Hulu says Watch Party is no longer in a “test” phase, and is now officially available to both sets of on-demand customers, including those on its commercial-free and ad-supported plans alike.
At launch, Watch Party works across thousands of on-demand titles from Hulu’s library. This includes not only Hulu’s own original content but also other licensed and broadcast programs like “The Golden Girls,” “This Is Us,” “Family Guy” and “The Bachelorette” — all of which Hulu said had been popular titles for Watch Party during the testing period.
To use Watch Party, you’ll look for the new Watch Party icon that appears on a title’s detail page on Hulu.com. This will provide a link that you can then share with up to seven other Hulu subscribers, age 18 or older. The experience doesn’t require a browser plugin, but works directly on the Hulu website itself.
As the program plays, users can chat and react with emoji in the group chat window, or even pause the viewing experience if they need to take a quick break. This won’t pause the stream for other viewers, as with some other co-watching experiences — instead, the user can rejoin the group and stay behind others or they can use a “Click to Catch Up” button in the chat window to get back in sync.
Co-watching has been a popular pandemic activity as people looked for ways to stay connected with friends and family when they couldn’t spend time in person. In addition to Hulu, Amazon Prime Video launched co-viewing and Twitch launched its own Watch Parties. HBO teamed up with Scener, Plex launched Watch Together and Instagram and Facebook rolled out co-viewing too. Netflix users still have to use third-party tools, however.
As businesses of all sizes welcome a fearful and anxious workforce back to the office, they are simultaneously challenged with ensuring a safe work environment. The stark reality facing business owners still navigating the covid-19 pandemic is the diligence required to limit infectious spread.
Corporations are taking note: plexiglass barriers, clearly marked walkways, and hand-sanitizing stations are now as commonplace as paper clips and ergonomic chairs. Although such measures can mitigate the risk of infection, management teams will be challenged to properly sanitize the workplace without jeopardizing human health or affecting employee productivity while also facing agency and government regulations.
Many business owners are finding solutions by partnering with innovative organizations like J Ferg Global, an industry leader in infection control, risk mitigation, and revenue restoration. “Our mission is to help organizations and their stakeholders get back on their feet with health and safety as a top priority,” says CEO J.R. Ferguson.
Tony Ensor, president and general manager of the Amarillo Sod Poodles, a San Diego Padres professional baseball affiliate, says it has been an enormous obstacle overcoming the constant changes to covid-19 regulations and safe practices. “Covid-19 affected our community baseball teams all over the country and has had a devastating effect on our franchise. How do we move forward?” After discussions with Sod Poodles’ director of partnerships, Matt Hamilton, Ensor chose to partner with the J Ferg Global company Germinator to create a comprehensive health safety and risk mitigation plan for reopening. “We wanted to go several steps above Texas guidelines to protect our fans, players, and staff,” says Ensor.
Innovators apply here
In addition to advances made by companies like J Ferg Global, the increasing need to safely and efficiently sanitize workspaces has created an exciting opportunity for innovation.
The Greater Boston Food Bank partnered with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Ava Robotics to test a robotic system that disinfects surfaces and neutralizes aerosolized forms of the coronavirus. Designed at CSAIL, the custom light fixture relies on short-wavelength ultraviolet light to kill microorganisms and disrupt their DNA in a process called ultraviolet germicidal irradiation.
As a result of the endless innovations in this space, companies like J Ferg Global can provide clients with the world’s most up-to-date state-of-the-art technologies to create safer public spaces. Ferguson welcomes the advance of new technologies as they will raise the bar for everyone: “Our goal is to constantly better ourselves in the workplace and expect the same standard in our technologies. Remaining stagnant or content is never an option, especially as it pertains to infection control. As technology continues to accelerate, we must all dial in and run with it.”
Proof of J Ferg Global’s commitment is evident in its new partnerships with a variety of infection control technology companies, which are creating effective, world-leading solutions, such as an air-purification system for air-conditioning units that could have wide-ranging, positive effects across multiple industries.
It will take more than technology to restore pre-pandemic levels of employee comfort. “The biggest issue we’re dealing with right now is the unknown,” says Ferguson. Amarillo Sod Poodles’ Ensor adds that clear communication, regular monitoring, and sanitization protocols provided by J Ferg Global reassures employees that the proper precautionary measures are being taken. “We’re thankful to be able to go to work every day with confidence, knowing that not only our full-time staff are protected, but everyone that enters Hodgetown [the Sod Poodle ballpark] is protected.”
These solutions have been imperative as many businesses, organizations, and schools reopen to the public. “Businesses, resources, and schools have to start getting back on their feet, restoring lost revenues, and moving forward,” says Ferguson. “If we don’t do something to fight this pandemic, who knows what the long-term consequences could be. Although it may include new precautions and safety procedures, we enjoy seeing people be proactive and adapt.”
This content was produced by J Ferg Global. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
Facial recognition technology is being deployed in housing projects, homeless shelters, schools, even across entire cities—usually without much fanfare or discussion. To some, this represents a critical technology for helping vulnerable communities gain access to social services. For others, it’s a flagrant invasion of privacy and violation of human dignity. In this episode, we speak to the advocates, technologists, and dissidents dealing with the messy consequences that come when a technology that can identify you almost anywhere (even if you’re wearing a mask) is deployed without any clear playbook for regulating or managing it.
We meet:
- Eric Williams, senior staff attorney at Detroit Justice Center
- Fabian Rogers, community advocate at Surveillance Technology Oversight Project
- Helen Knight, founder of Tech for Social Good
- Ray Bolling, president and co-founder of Eyemetric Identity Systems
- Mary Sunden, executive director of the Christ Church Community Development Corporation
Credits
This episode was reported and produced by Jennifer Strong, Tate Ryan-Mosley, Emma Cillekens, and Karen Hao. We’re edited by Michael Reilly and Gideon Lichfield.
Transcript
[TR ID]
Strong: So, I’m in lower Manhattan next to some buildings known as Knickerbocker Village. You might hear the subway running up overhead there. So history buffs might know this spot as kind of a birthplace of housing rights. Some of New York City’s first regulations on rental housing came to exist here because of the tenants association. These buildings were also among the very first federally funded affordable housing units. They’re about 90 years old and were built to support a new middle class after the great depression. But the reason I’m here is because it’s also among the very first apartment complexes in New York city to install facial recognition instead of keys. And this is not recently either. It was about seven years ago after Hurricane Sandy tore through the area, doing incredible damage and causing awful flooding. And it was in those repairs that the apartments received some upgrades, including this keyless entry system at all the gates that uses face ID.
And you know, it doesn’t look super different from the usual call boxes that let you buzz somebody up and I did kind of wonder how easy they’d be to spot, but it’s actually super easy for a few reasons. One is the days are short now. And so it’s kind of dark out here and all the entry points have these really bright spotlights shining on them, I guess, to light people’s faces and make it easier for the system to detect them. The other is this kind of funny little dance, maybe it’s like a lean in lean out motion that some of the folks trying to get into the apartment building are doing as they get closer to these cameras. It’s pretty chilly out here. So I’m guessing they’re trying to get the door to unlock more quickly.
Strong: Problems with this setup.. aren’t new. It’s well documented that facial recognition often doesn’t work as well on non-white faces… which explains why some residents have had difficulty gaining access to this building. It’s also unlocked the door to faces of non-residents in the past. In the future, use of this technology might be regulated… but for now, how and where it gets used remains a wild west. I’m Jennifer Strong and as part of our latest miniseries on face I-D, we’re going to look at use in housing, and a bunch of thorny questions that raises.
[SHOW ID]
[Sound from Green Light Announcement: and I welcome you all today to the Detroit public safety headquarters for this exciting announcement of Project Green Light Detroit.]
Strong: That was 2016… and the birth of what would become one of the more controversial surveillance projects in the US.
[Sound from Green Light Announcement: The violence level in this city is not acceptable.]
Strong: For decades, Detroit, Michigan has been listed among the most violent cities in the country. This is Mike Duggan – the city’s mayor.
[Sound from Green Light Announcement: But if we don’t do something differently we are not going to change the trajectory…. and so how many times have you seen on TV if you recognize this person call in and there is such a grainy image you have no idea. It could be your own brother and you wouldn’t know from that image…]
Strong: And so, they tried something new… a collaboration between police and local businesses.. with the latest technology.
[Sound from Green Light Announcement: …and we said.. what if we went to some gas stations, who volunteered, and set a standard that you light your gas station all the way to the perimeter so bright you can read a magazine. And then and you put such high definition color camerasand put in an internet connection we will monitor it real time at police headquarters.]
Strong: in other words…private companies pay to install top quality cameras that stream live video back to police headquarters… and in return, they receive more time and services from police.
[Sound from Green Light Announcement (Mayor Mike Duggan): … ok so it is on that screen right there]
Strong: Next.. he shows people at the press conference how this system works.
[Sound from Green Light Announcement (Mayor Mike Duggan): but I want you to see the visibility. [wow!] That is what our officers are looking at upstairs in the real time crime centre right now. They can see dozens of screens at once…I mean how much different is this.]
Strong: And as you can hear from the reaction of the crowd, the quality of this video is a total game changer.
[Sound from Green Light Announcement (Mayor Mike Duggan): This is what we are going to do across the city…. And the other thing is…We’ve got facial recognition software coming next. We are going to be able… before too long… to match outstanding warrants against these cameras… So this is what it looks like at night. Take a look. 10 o’clock at night. You can see how bright the lighting is. And this is why it was so critical that we have the lighting standards in addition to the camera standard.]
Strong: Today, Project Green Light’s cameras cover hundreds of shops… They’re also pointed at public housing… schools… and transportation. But when it started five years ago it was just a handful of gas stations.
[Sound from Green Light Announcement: So it fell upon us as small business owners to be that catalyst. Because for Detroit to be a great city and come back… the neighborhoods to come back. They have to be safe. Public safety is a right of every citizen in the city Detroit and we are honored to be part of it]
Strong: At the time there was a lot of support for Project Green Light… many saw it as the community coming together… working with each other and with police to take back its streets…
[Sound from Green Light Announcement: Project Greenlight is good news. And not just for our police, but it’s great news for our community. We should celebrate it. We should support it. We should expand it. When people talk about neighborhoods we not doing enough for neighbourhoods, well you need to tell them about this program. This is the spirit of Detroit. This just made my job so much easier and if i can have a video of the crime being committed… I’ve just won my case. (clapping)]
Strong: But looking back, it’s not so straightforward.
Williams: There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that project Green Light has produced a reduction in crime in Detroit.
Strong: Eric Williams is a senior staff attorney at the nonprofit law firm… Detroit Justice Center.
Williams: in terms of its success with the initial eight stations, there was a substantial reduction in criminal activity at those sites right year over year, since those eight sites, the findings are much less clear.
Strong: And activists including Williams have other concerns with this project.
Williams: Ironically project Green Light is something that I became involved in prior to actually going to the Detroit justice center. I was just, my sensibilities are just offended by its very existence. I have problems with that kind of police surveillance.
Strong: His main point of contention?
Williams: The problem that I have with Project Green Light in particular is the utter lack of transparency, right? For example, facial recognition technology was being used in conjunction with Project Green Light for almost two years before people really knew anything about it.
Strong: He says the public didn’t really grasp what was happening. That their comings and goings would be livestreamed to police headquarters from hundreds of points about the city… and their faces could be scanned and identified. Though, as you heard, the city was quite clear from the day of launch that it planned to use facial recognition. It also provides a public map with the locations of all these cameras… and there are signs, often with a pulsing green light, that mark their presence. But… how many people really pay attention to local government officials talking about public private partnerships? And what would consent mean in this context? There’s little choice when your home, job, school and local shops… are all surrounded by these cameras…
[Sound from protests in Detroit: chanting]
Strong: Over the summer… tensions between Detroit citizens and the police boiled to the surface. And… one of the key requests?
[Sound from protests in Detroit: These are our collective demands…. The second one is… getting rid of Project Green Light…]
Williams: We’d like to see, for example, legislation prohibiting the use of facial recognition technology in public housing. Like right now project Green Light is on public buses, is in public schools and actually in places where poor people are disproportionately likely to be right, this is how that’s working. So we’d like to see if nothing else, a moratorium of its use by law enforcement.
Strong: But facial recognition isn’t just creeping into public housing via police. As popularity of the technology grows and the cost of acquiring it drops, landlords big and small are looking to install it as a way to increase security or present the property as having the latest upgrades and conveniences like keyless entry. Facial recognition isn’t regulated, so, we simply don’t know how often it’s used or whether those uses are effective. But we did meet a tenant who, at least for the moment, has stopped his landlord from installing a system that unlocks doors with faces instead of keys.
Fabian: I come from Atlantic Plaza towers. Where our landlord tried to install facial recognition into the building
Strong: Fabian Rogers is a tenant and community advocate in New York City.
Fabian: So, I’m here speaking on behalf of those who usually don’t have the time or money to do so.
Strong: Atlantic Plaza is a rent-stabilized housing complex in Brooklyn. Two years ago he found a notice in his mailbox about improvements to the buildings.
Fabian: We didn’t know what we were dealing with at the time when everybody did background research trying to understand what was it that the landlord was trying to put in, cause this wasn’t your typical major capital improvement where he’s just trying to change the awnings on the building or trying to update the, the, the terraces. He’s trying to put in facial recognition at the front. And so it will be mandatory to have to use the technology if it were to be deployed and installed in each building.
Strong: Together with more than a hundred other tenants… he decided to fight back.
Fabian: The concerns that we had as tenants was not for more security or more surveillance. We were already being over-surveilled in our building as is with 24, 24-7 HD recording cameras within every nook and cranny of these buildings except in our apartments and the fire escape stairs. We just understood this as another tool to pester with our living situation. This wasn’t just welcoming a new technology that will help our lives be better. It was never that type of situation.
Strong: They self-organized and sent a letter to the management company opposing the cameras.
Fabian: To this day, we have never gotten a response back.
Strong: And this bugged them. So they enlisted the help of a legal firm… and they got a meeting with the landlord.
Fabian: What’s the purpose of you installing this technology? Like, what’s the purpose for this for us? What about the case of a police want subpoenas? And they find they have a suspect in the building. Now, what, like, what databases is, is does this tech access, what does it share? What does it save? How does it save? Who does it give the data to? And things like that, all of these ethical questions and logistical questions… they’d even wrapped their heads around it. They were just caught up in like we got some new tech from a startup company. We want to try to implement it so we can try to get some new tenants who are willing to pay a higher rent.
Strong: Ultimately, the cameras weren’t installed. But that doesn’t mean the issue is settled. Security projects like this one might get funding from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development but it doesn’t track whether face ID gets used or how. And landlords can pretty much do what they want with it.
Fabian: And it’s just scary. And again, this all happens because there’s a lack of legislation. I’m not a stickler against technological innovation. That’s not what I’m saying here. What I’m saying is we need to question the contextuality in which we’re using new technology that is, you know, proliferating and is being deployed in society. Are they really ethical? Are they really better than the low tech solutions that we have? Is techno-solutionism always the answer to the, to the issue at hand and for housing I personally don’t think so.
Strong: There is legislation before the House and Senate that would put a pause on using identity technologies in housing that’s financially supported by the federal government. It’s called the “No Biometric Barriers to Housing Act”. New York City is also considering coming up with its own rules on biometric data, housing and landlords, but blanket bans are concerning to some. Including a few people we met who provide housing to the homeless.
Knight: I think that we’re losing an entire category of a way to serve and support people who don’t have trust, but need help.
Strong: Helen Knight is the founder of a Candian startup that works with nonprofits. It’s called tech for social good dot c-a. She argues there’s a strong use case for face I-D to help vulnerable communities.
Knight: They are victims of crime. They have recently been evicted from their home. They’re in a crisis situation and it’s completely reasonable that they do not have a driver’s license. Do not have a passport. Don’t have any form of picture ID. They need help today. So you can’t turn them away. You shouldn’t turn them away. The intention is to provide them service.
Strong: But to do that effectively, shelters need to be able to show how many different people use their services and who those people are… It’s how they’re funded. It’s also how they connect people to social services and other programs.
Knight: As it stands right now, the onus is on the person that’s in the middle of a crisis situation to articulate their exact need I mean, without having an actual way to identify what their journey through the system has been and see where they’ve been to other facilities or food banks or, medical programs, then it’s just, it’s just me standing before you telling you my story over and over again, telling you about the trauma in my life. And hoping that I say the magic words that end up with getting me a house.
Strong: She directed use of this technology for a homeless shelter in the city of Calgary… and she says all the identification methods available… have problems.
Knight: So there was a facility that used fingerprint identification, uh, for over a decade and largely it works well. It doesn’t work completely, depending on the people in the shelter facility. It doesn’t really work on cold fingers where it doesn’t work on dirty fingers. It doesn’t work on damaged fingers and it doesn’t work on missing fingers.
Strong: And issues with using somebody’s fingerprints for ID run deeper than just whether they work or not…
Knight: it’s not trauma-informed to have somebody walk into a facility and say, yes, you can absolutely come in, but let me just take your fingerprints. There’s multiple problems. One, the screen is glowing green, which is a trigger and scary for people that are having paranoid delusions, perhaps they don’t want to touch that, that scary thing that potentially, um, disease transmission, uh, but also the mental experience of having been arrested and fingerprinted in the past. You’re actually repeating that same trauma every time they enter the facility.
Strong: She’s also tried tracking devices powered by R-F-I-D…..which stands for radio-frequency identification. And they tried iris recognition, which is where a scanner reads a person’s eyes. Ultimately though, she found face recognition to be the thing that worked.
Knight: So, uh, facial recognition is really the only one that is possible and available, um, at all times. … // SO Facial Recognition is kinder emotionally in that it’s passive, it, doesn’t touch them and you can capture it more quickly and there’s no risk of transmission. So there, I, I’m eager to see the extent extended application of facial recognition, because it’s the kindest thing that you can do to people that have had traumatic lives and, and still know who they are and help them in the way that they need to be helped.
Bolling: Is that a photo of you?
Strong: Oh, it is. Yes that’s my LinkedIn.
Bolling: So I guess I just identified you utilizing a photo that I took from LinkedIn that I enrolled in our software and then just utilizing a regular webcam with you wearing a mask. I was able to identify you.
Strong: Wow. Wow. That’s that’s me with a mask and a hood and headphones and whatever else around my face here.
Bolling: Hello, my name is Ray Bolling. I am the president and co-founder of eyemetric identity systems.
Strong: We’re outside on a city street and he’s giving me a runthrough of his software. His company creates applications powered by fingerprints, iris scans and now with facial recognition to identify someone when they enter a building … including shelters for the homeless … food banks… and public schools.
Bolling: We have seen an increased interest in this technology as a result of COVID. We need to be able to do things in a contactless manner, um, but still be able to properly identify people. Um, but do it in a way. Um, that’s not involving the transfer, you know, our visitor management system where we’d ask someone to hand over their driver’s license when there’s an exchange of a card or an ID, um, you potentially could be transferring germs, utilizing a contactless method of facial recognition or iris it’s something that, um, doesn’t require any transfer or con or, uh, of information, you know, of a physical piece of plastic.
Strong: Other facial recognition systems we’ve talked about on this show sit on top of massive databases of photos taken from the internet. But not this one.
Bolling: Yes, our customers, when they purchase or install, one of our systems, our staff are starting with an empty database. They build the database themselves with known people and that are willingly and actively participating in the enrollment of the system. They are also actively involved when they are recognized.
Strong: In practice it might work something like this…
Bolling: Typically we will get an import of all the students or staff members from a school district. And we have all their information. Our first attempt is to try to enroll everybody off of a photograph, an existing photograph, but they have to be of good quality. Typically a school portrait picture works well, but there are cases due to lighting or hair that we need to retake that individual’s photo, uh, to have them enroll directly into the system.
Strong: Then ….
Bolling: The students just walk up to a Microsoft surface tablet with a webcam. They stand in front of it and it signs them into school. …
Strong: And he says it’s more efficient than other options.
Bolling: …It’s important to the school district because they get reimbursed by the state based upon attendance. So they have a biometric means to verify the attendance of the kids that showed up that day. And it prevented students from borrowing or taking a friend’s ID card and checking them in.
Strong: One of his clients is the Christ Church Community Development Corporation. It provides shelter, engagement and outreach services for the homeless in Bergen County, New Jersey. They use his company’s fingerprint scanners, and over the next couple of months, they plan to also add facial recognition as another way to sign-in. Biometrics have helped them collect better data which they’ve used to tackle some big problems
Sunden: We are the first community in the country to have ended both veterans homelessness and chronic homelessness.
Strong: Mary Sunden is the group’s executive director.
Sunden: And one of the main reasons that we were able to do that is because of the information we collect and the way in which we use it to help the folks we work with.
Strong: This work has received national recognition from the federal agency that oversees housing and urban development. And she says the additional data they gather has also helped them track trends over time.
Sunden: So what we’ve noticed in the last two years is a significant increase in people who are 60 and older, who are in the homeless system. This is not something that we ever had in our area 10 years ago, for example. So if all of a sudden, instead of 20% of the people who come to dinner every night are 60 years old or older, all of a sudden it’s 30%. And that goes on for more than just a day or two, then we see something’s going on and we need to go and look into it and try and figure out what’s the cause behind that. But it’s the data that shows you things changing. And then you have to put the personal work into figuring out the motivation behind it or the reasons behind it.
Strong: Right now… she’s testing a camera that takes people’s temperatures… and hopes it won’t be a far leap for clients to accept the addition of facial recognition.
Sunden: So you walk in the building and it automatically checks your temperature. And it there’s a picture of you. It’s not storing your picture, but there you are, and it tells your temperature, it guesses your gender and your age incorrectly, we enjoy fooling it. I have changed, um, in the last week from an elderly to a middle-aged man or a woman. So that’s kind of fun… but people I don’t expect in this pandemic that when people are in our building again soon that they will have difficulty with that because they’ll understand that the purpose of it is to keep them safe and. Life is just much more invasive now and we’re used to it. Um, so I think that that has an advantage that we’re trying to, we try to take advantage of things that happen. So the fact that, that, you know, people are used to being asked invasive questions about their health. We’re just going to take advantage of that. And the facial rec is just another thing, not that different from the temperature scanning system.
Strong: Next episode…
Donnie Scott: You could see a future where as you arrive to the sporting event, it directs you to your parking based on recognizing your car or on sharing who you are from your phone. From parking, you’re going to be directed through the shortest line. You know that line’s going to move quickly because it’s biometrically enabled.
Strong: We look at how facial recognition and other tracking systems are changing the sports experience in the stands and on the court.
Mike D’Auria: What this is intended to do is track the movement of every player and the ball 25 times a second. So you can kind of think over the course of one typical NBA basketball game, you’re able to kind of capture millions of data points that didn’t exist before and use those to build a suite of products or experiences on top of that can really change the way that we see and interact with sports.
Strong: This episode was reported and produced by me, Emma Cillekens, Tate Ryan-Mosley, and Karen Hao. We’re edited by Michael Reilly and Gideon Lichfield. Thanks for listening, I’m Jennifer Strong.
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On December 5, Earth is getting a delivery of something literally out of this world: some small grains and dust snatched up from an asteroid 180 million miles away. Once safely back on Earth, the fragments of Ryugu will help scientists learn more about how the solar system formed.
JAXA, Japan’s space agency, launched Hayabusa2 six years ago, on December 3, 2014. The spacecraft made it to Ryugu four years later in July 2018, where it studied its new 3,000-foot-wide home from orbit using several kinds of instruments (including optical cameras, infrared cameras, and LIDAR). It also deployed three small rovers to the asteroid’s surface that used a variety of instruments to study it close up.
All of this went a long way toward helping scientists better understand Ryugu, a primitive rock rich in carbon, though more porous, rubbly, and containing less hydrated minerals than initially predicted. Asteroids like Ryugu are the most common type, but because they are so dark, they are tricky to study through telescopes. Even observations like Hayabusa2’s are limited since there are only so many kinds of instruments you can send into space, and they don’t always survive the journey (one of Hayabusa2’s four rovers actually failed before its release).
But nothing compares to the analysis we can do inside state-of-the-art labs on Earth. That brings us to the marquee purpose of Hayabusa2: to bring a sample of Ryugu back to Earth.
Sample return missions are becoming increasingly in vogue, as evidenced by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission and China’s current Chang’e 5 drilling operation on the moon. But they aren’t easy. In February 2019, Hayabusa2 landed on the surface and fired two small bullets into the asteroid to stir up a cloud of particles from which the sample arm could collect debris. It fired a larger projectile in April that same year, diving down to the surface a couple months later to retrieve even more ejected material.
Whereas the first Hayabusa mission was only able to bring back a millionth of a gram through this approach, there’s optimism Hayabusa2 will bring back much more. “I am proud of this success, even though I don’t know yet that the re-entry [of the sample capsule] will be successful,” says Eri Tatsumi, a planetary scientist at the University of La Laguna in Spain who has been working directly with Hayabusa2’s data so far.
Asteroids are like time capsules of ancient space history because their physical and chemical composition is much better preserved over time than, say, a planet’s (whose internal heating and potential magnetic field and atmosphere encourages ongoing activity). In this case, studying material from Ryugu can help us understand what the early solar system was like when massive amounts of gas and dust were coalescing into different asteroids, moons, and planets—including habitable worlds like Earth.
“What we would like to know is what the processes are that shaped the solar system,” says Tatsumi. “I would like to know what kind of organics are in Ryugu—if it has the building blocks for life.” She believes studying Ryugu’s samples could allow scientists to “add another page to our knowledge about the materials in the early solar system,” and what kinds of elements and compounds might have been delivered to the early Earth via meteorite impacts. Ryugu itself seems to be too fragile to survive a present-day entry into Earth’s atmosphere, so it’s likely quite different from the meteorite remains on Earth we have been able to analyze so far.
In addition, there are some peculiar things about Ryugu’s history that require the type of context you can only get from laboratory analysis. Tomokatsu Morota, a planetary scientist from the University of Tokyo, led a team that studied Ryugu’s surface using images taken by Hayabusa2’s cameras. The team noticed alterations on the surface caused by solar heating. “This suggests a scenario where Ryugu underwent an orbital excursion near the sun,” he says. A closer look at the rock fragments could help confirm whether that happened or not.
Hayabusa2 will drop off the sample capsule of Ryugu material in just a few days. It must survive a fiery reentry before landing in Australia. The spacecraft itself, however, will head back out for an extended mission—first to asteroid 2001 CC21 for a flyby in July 2026, and then a formal rendezvous with asteroid 1998 KY26 in July 2031. In between those highlights the spacecraft will make a pair of swings around Earth while attempting to make observations of distant exoplanets.
Hayabusa2’s success will live on in future sample return missions too. JAXA is planning one for the Martian moon Phobos, called Martian Moon eXploration, or MMX. “MMX is technically made from a lot of the heritage established by Hayabusa and Hayabusa2,” says Tatsumi. “And Hayabusa2’s project involved many young scientists and engineers who will lead next generation’s missions. Given those experiences, JAXA can launch more complicated and larger missions in the future.”