LIMERICK startup company EmotionReader has been acquired by US-based facial recognition technology business Kairos in a multi-million dollar deal.
Emotion Reader, which was established last year by Dr Stephen Moore and Dr Padraig O’Leary, uses algorithms to analyse facial expressions in video content.
Kairos wants to accelerate the adoption of facial recognition as a verification tool and will deploy EmotionReader’s research team to improve current face recognition systems by optimising the algorithms to work without bias on all races, ethnicities, genders, and ages of faces.
Dr Moore, who is Kairos’s new chief scientific officer, said that with recent advances in artificial intelligence and deep learning, a tipping point had been reached where it will change the lives of millions of people for the better.
Kairos said it would now consolidate its research and development team in its Singapore office, and that Dr Moore would lead the team.
Kairos chief executive Brian Brackeen concedes that facial recognition technology has problems with racial bias. He said there was a need to have honest dialogue around the troubling inefficiency of algorithms to properly identify people of colour.
“If you think of machine learning in terms of teaching a child, you cannot reasonably expect a child to recognise something or someone it has never or seldom seen. Similarly, in the case of algorithmic ethnic bias, the system can only be as diverse in its recognition of ethnicities as the catalogue of photos on which it has been trained,” he explained.
by Tom McCullough
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