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Architects and designers are helping cities fight back against AI surveillance

2022-03-08T10:31:00-05:00

Cities are being overwhelmed by a top-down, algorithmically-enabled attempt to make them legible, quantifiable and replicable. Can a project of nonsense-making disrupt the seemingly inexorable march of "progress"?

Anti-digital mapping and other seriously stylish interventions have taken cues from protest groups like the Umbrella Movement. Many now see them as key areas in which architects can play a role alongside other designers and urbanists to halt the encroachment of certain proptech entities with software that can learn “the concept of gentrification itself."

Knott eventually tied anti-gentrification pushback against high tech real estate to the long-standing tradition of intervention into urban planning endeavors, saying that, in the end, it is up to communities of people who can utilize the notion in an all-out effort to prevent the wholesale creation of what he called the “algorithmic city.”

“Design alone won’t save neighbourhoods from the gentrifying tendencies of urbanism tech...

Facial recognition takes center stage at Bi-City Biennale in Hong Kong

2019-11-21T18:59:00-05:00

The Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture of Hong Kong and Shenzhen that opens this December is set to become "the first exhibition to use Facial Recognition and Artificial Intelligence on its own premises," according to biennale chief curator Carlo Ratti. The focus is created "in order to prompt a critical reflection on how digital technologies are impacting urban life," a press release from Carlo Ratti Associati explains.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology-based architect aims to "explore the new urban condition of cities that can 'see'" with the exhibition focus, which will inform a linear exhibition space situated within a high-speed railway station in Shenzhen that connects Mainland China with Hong Kong.

Image courtesy of Carlo Ratti Associati

Hong Kong has been gripped by powerful protests in recent months as the public there struggles against attempts by China to imposition of its legal jurisdiction on the island, which is supposed to enjoy administrative and eco...

Face-scanning to make Olympic debut at 2020 Tokyo games

2019-09-18T13:15:00-04:00

Intel is collaborating with NEC to provide "a large-scale face recognition system for the Olympics," said Ricardo Echevarria, general manager of Intel's Olympics program. The system is designed to let Olympics organizers "ensure smoothly secure verification for the over 300,000 people at the games who are accredited," he said. People using it will register with photos from government-issued IDs, he added.

Facial recognition will be used by the organizers to keep track of athletes, staff, volunteers, and other individuals involved with the event. The general public will not be involved in the effort.

The 2020 Olympic games in Tokyo will mark the first time that the event makes wide-spread use of facial recognition software.

The proliferation of facial recognition causes concern in London

2019-08-16T17:00:00-04:00

It emerged...that the property developer Argent was using the cameras “in the interests of public safety” in King’s Cross, mostly north of the railway station across an area including the Google headquarters and the Central Saint Martins art school, but the precise uses of the technology remained unclear.

Residents in the King's Cross district in London have mixed feelings concerning the use of facial recognition CCTV in the area. “For law enforcement purposes, there is some justification, but personally I don’t think a private developer has the right to have that in a public place,” one resident told The Guardian, expressing his dissatisfaction with the technology's use by a "private entity."

Others didn't seem to care as much."I don't mind being recognized...Actually, I feel safer if it's used for security reasons...," another resident expressed to The Guardian, sharing her favor with it being used to keep out criminals. In the end, it doesn't seem clear what the technology is being used for, however.

Facial recognition technology would be banned from public housing per new bill

2019-07-31T16:35:00-04:00

The legislation, dubbed the “No Biometric Barriers to Housing Act,” was introduced by Congresswoman Yvette Clark whose district borders the Atlantic Plaza Towers in Brownsville where tenants made headlines this spring with their fight to keep a facial recognition system out of their apartment complex.

Back in May, residents of the Atlantic Plaza Towers in Brooklyn opposed the installation of facial recognition technology proposed by their landlord. Now a bill has been introduced that would prohibit "facial, voice, fingerprint, and DNA identification technologies" within federally funded public housing.

Brooklyn tenants reject landlord's plan to install facial recognition system

2019-05-09T09:00:00-04:00

Last year, residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent-stabilized apartment building in Brooklyn, found out that their landlord was planning to replace the key fob entry system with facial recognition technology. [...] But some residents were immediately alarmed by the prospect: They felt the landlord’s promise of added security was murky at best, and didn’t outweigh their concerns about having to surrender sensitive biometric information to enter their own homes.

"Housing complexes of low-income residents may be one early testing ground for residential applications of facial recognition technology," writes Tanvi Misra for CityLab. "But they’re not the only ones. Amazon’s doorbell company, Ring, is coming out with a video doorbell that incorporates facial recognition, which has the ACLU worried about the risk of high-tech profiling of 'suspicious' persons."

The biometric identities of buildings

2018-04-20T13:37:00-04:00

[...] iPhoto confused a human friend of mine – I’ll call him Mike – with a building called the Great Mosque of Cordoba. [...] Rather than viewing this as a failure, I realized I had found a new insight: Just as people’s faces have features that can be recognized by algorithms, so do buildings. That began my effort to perform facial recognition on buildings – or, more formally, “architectural biometrics.” Buildings, like people, may just have biometric identities too.

Peter Christensen, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, elaborates on his research with 'facial recognition' on buildings to unlock architectural secrets.

New key-less Moscow apartments use facial recognition to open doors and elevators

2018-04-17T15:26:00-04:00

A new Moscow apartment building has unveiled a fully-functioning facial recognition system designed to replace residents’ keys. [...] As well as allowing homeowners to enter the building without a key, the system automatically selects each resident’s floor when they enter the lift, and keeps tabs on cars and pedestrians leaving the complex.

Goodbye to public anonymity? This new Russian face-recognition app may spell its end

2016-05-18T17:06:00-04:00

If the founders of a new face recognition app get their way, anonymity in public could soon be a thing of the past. FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability. It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts.

"In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks."

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Japanese government pushes for advanced technology in Tokyo Olympic Stadium, including facial recognition

2015-03-09T19:54:00-04:00

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says he wants Japan to showcase its cutting-edge technology in the new national stadium being built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. Abe made the remark on Monday at a meeting with a study panel on the stadium. [...] Prime Minister Abe [...] said he wants to hear people in other countries calling the new stadium great. Some people have raised concerns about high maintenance costs for the new facility.

While some of that Japanese cutting-edge technology (for example 3D projection) will be found in the entertainment department, other features, like facial recognition, could enable ticketless entrance and serve security and counterterrorism efforts.

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