Mar 20, 2018
We’ve been hearing more and more about facial recognition and biometric identification technology lately, and this week’s guest on The Credentialed is on the cutting edge of this emerging realm. Brian Brackeen is CEO and founder of Kairos, a six-year-old facial recognition and “human analytics” firm based in Miami which serves clients such as Disney and Walmart.
An outspoken proponent of algorithmic data diversity, facial recognition privacy standards and Miami as an under-appreciated hub of tech innovation, Brackeen stands out.
He talked on the show about how an algorithm is like a human mind, limited to what it’s been exposed to:
“If you teach the young algorithm that this is the world, and you don’t show it anything else -- you don’t show it any other races, any other ages, any other genders -- that’s all it will be able to see. It will actually be literally blind to the rest of the world,” he said during his chat on The Credentialed, where he and host Kate Kaye discussed the movement supporting the inclusion of data representing under-represented minority groups often forgotten when training AI systems and algorithms.
Brackeen also shared his personal story, which he likened to the Iron Man Marvel comics tale in which scientist and inventor Howard Stark inspires his son to take up engineering. It’s no coincidence that Brackeen’s own father worked on some of the first artificial intelligence systems during his career at the Philadelphia Electric Company.