Clearview AI is in the news again. This time, the company is being flagged for having allowed wealthy investors to try its biometric identification app on a personal basis. The company has already generated more than its share of controversy, first when a New York Times report revealed that the company had been providing police…
Beijing-based facial recognition company Megvii has indeed pressed ahead with its push for a Q4 IPO in Hong Kong, but has reportedly run into a regulatory obstacle. Citing anonymous “with knowledge of the matter”, Reuters reports that the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s Listing Committee did not approve Megvii’s application last week, with committee members asking…
NEC Asia Pacific has teamed up with a US-based network security firm to help shore up the defenses of its smart city platform. The company has signed on as a reseller of BlackRidge’s cybersecurity solutions, with a focus on the latter’s TAC Identity Device. TAC-ID is a two-port, in-line network device that is designed to…
More than 400 police departments are participating in a surveillance program with Ring, an Amazon-owned smart doorbell platform, according to a new Washington Post report. As a consumer product, the Ring smart doorbell is a straightforward enough proposition: It’s designed to record video footage of whoever is at a user’s door. The user can view…
Vuzix has partnered with the Dubai-based software developer NNTC to create a wearable facial recognition platform designed for security purposes. The solution is called iFalcon Face Control Mobile, and it combines the Vuzix Blade Smart Glasses with NNTC’s autonomous AI facial recognition system. With the new solution, security guards (and anyone else carrying out perimeter…
“Based out of Hong Kong, Megvii is the developer of the Face++ facial recognition platform, and has emerged as one of the industry’s biggest unicorns in the past few years.” Megvii has been exonerated in an investigation into human rights violations in China. The New York-based Human Rights Watch previously uncovered Megvii code in a…
“The IBIA is not alone in taking issue with the ban; after the legislation passed its Board vote, an advocacy group called Stop Crime SF issued a statement insisting that the ban could have been a moratorium, since facial recognition technology shows considerable potential as a crime-fighting tool. “ The International Biometrics + Identity Association…
Hong Kong-based AI specialist Megvii has raised $750 million through its latest funding round, the company has announced. The news comes after Megvii raised $600 million in an investment round last year, and amid speculation that the company is planning an IPO. It’s now valued at a little over $4 billion. The announcement also comes…
“Responding to media inquiries, Megvii has asserted that it has no agreement for the use of its technology in the Chinese police app, and indeed that it has no knowledge of how its technology was integrated into the app.” The surveillance state that Chinese authorities have built in the country’s Xinjiang region is more intensive…
Amazon is now calling for government regulation of facial recognition technology, even as it defends sales of its own such technology to law enforcement authorities. In a new post on the Amazon Web Services Machine Learning blog, the company’s VP of Global Public Policy, Michael Punke, writes, “We support the calls for an appropriate national…
“As with the Butterflye camera announced by Ooma a year ago, the Ooma Smart Cam also features a facial recognition system that allows it to identify known individuals, such as family members in a given household, and to send alerts to administrators when unknown individuals are detected. “ Ooma has announced the latest version of…
NEC is embracing an Arm standard for smart city security. The company has announced a partnership with Arm Limited that will revolve around the latter’s Arm Platform Security Architecture, or PSA. The standard concerns securely connecting devices in the Internet of Things, which is of course an area of overlap with smart city solutions, an…
“Tencent says its aim is to use facial recognition technology to match players against their government databases in order to verify their ages, which suggests it’s working closely with government authorities.” At the Chinese government’s behest, Tencent Holdings says it is exploring the use of facial recognition technology to prevent minors from playing its wildly…
A joint funding program between SenseTime and MIT could deliver significant advancements in artificial intelligence technology. The MIT-SenseTime Alliance on Artificial Intelligence has announced funding for 27 projects covering a range of areas. One, for example, is a collaboration between academics from MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, its Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,…
Xloong, a Hong Kong-based tech company specializing in Augmented Reality glasses, is looking to the government’s growing interest in biometric surveillance technology to turn the company to profitability. The firm was founded in 2015, and has tailored its smart glasses technology to a number of applications including industrial engineering, messaging displays in military helmets, and…
Chinese AI startup Yitu has brought in $300 million in investments over the last two months. The total is the product of a newly announced investment of $100 million from China Industrial Asset Management, which follows after a $200 million series-C investment round in June. Investors are evidently excited about Yitu’s artificial intelligence technology, which the…
As controversy over the public use of facial recognition continues, Microsoft is following Google’s lead in laying out its approach to the ethics of the technology in a new blog post by the company’s President, Brad Smith. It’s a far less concise and straightforward accounting than the one laid out by Google CEO Sundar Prichai,…
The world’s biggest police organization is now officially delving into artificial intelligence and robotics. The technologies were on display at the INTERPOL Global Complex for Innovation this week, during a two day event organized by the INTERPOL Innovation Centre and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute. The two-day event featured about 50…
