This company says it’s developing a system that can recognize your face from just your DNA
Though it almost certainly won’t work, it is a telling sign of where the field is heading
By
January 31, 2022
MS TECH | ENVATO
A police officer is at the scene of a murder. No witnesses. No camera footage. No obvious suspects or motives. Just a bit of hair on the sleeve of the victim’s jacket. DNA from the cells of one strand is copied and compared against a database. No match comes back, and the case goes cold.
Corsight AI, a facial recognition subsidiary of the Israeli AI company Cortica, purports to be devising a solution for that sort of situation by using DNA to create a model of a face that can then be run through a facial recognition system. It is a task that experts in the field regard as scientifically untenable.
Corsight unveiled its “DNA to Face” product in a presentation by chief executive officer Robert Watts and executive vice president Ofer Ronen intended to court financiers at the Imperial Capital Investors Conference in New York City on December 15. It was part of the company’s overall product road map, which also included movement and voice recognition. The tool “constructs a physical profile by analyzing genetic material collected in a DNA sample,” according to a company slide deck viewed by surveillance research group IPVM and shared with MIT Technology Review.
A photo of Corsight’s investor presentation showing its product roadmap that features “voice to face”, “DNA to face” and “movement” as an expansion of its face recognition capabilities.
Corsight declined a request to answer questions about the presentation and its product road map. “We are not engaging with the press at the moment as the details of what we are doing are company confidential,” Watts wrote in an email.
But marketing materials show that the company is focused on government and law enforcement applications for its technology. Its advisory board consists only of James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, and Oliver Revell, a former assistant director of the FBI.
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