ICE’s Mobile Fortify app turns facial recognition into a street-level surveillance tool aimed at non-citizens and citizens alike. In October of 2020, during the latter part of the first Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security— specifically, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released a smartphone app with AI facial recognition capability. CBP claims that close to a … Read more
In all of the horrific stories surrounding the killing of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, I haven’t seen much speculation about why he was not only filming her with his smartphone at the time, but did so while moving around the front of her car, and even using it to record himself in … Read more
Generative AI isn’t supposed to have opinions. Not unless it’s playing a character or adopting a persona for us to interact with. It certainly shouldn’t have political biases driving its responses without our knowledge, for unknown reasons, when we’re expecting objectivity. So when we learn that a generative AI model has been programmed for bias, … Read more
One of my first-year classes in college was History of Theater, in which I learned how the Greeks built amphitheaters into hillsides, carving out a semicircle of seating for the audience around the stage to maximize. The scenery for a play completes the circle, just as it does for any show in an amphitheater today. … Read more
The subject of patient engagement tools, especially patient portals, took up permanent residence in my head last January when my mother, a few months away from achieving octogenarian status, experienced a health event that would change both of our lives. When she came home from the hospital, suddenly she was no longer under 24-7 observation … Read more
Sora is a video generation model that translates text to video, a product of OpenAI released earlier this month, and a painbot is a concept I hatched a few days ago while talking to ChatGPT about AI empathy and the potential for AI to recognize, record, and react to human pain. My initial thought was … Read more
This is an essay in two parts: First, a somewhat rambling conversation that I had with ChatGPT about its own limitations in healthcare, and the limitations of those designing and using it. After that it’s time for the reality check, and some reflection. I review the research on where things currently stand with empathy and … Read more
The discussion about AI, specifically about generative AI (whether it’s labeled as such, or just “AI”), revolves around what it means to be human, and it’s doing my head in. Not because I have trouble grappling with the subject matter– my academic research revolved around intuitions we have about invisible agency, specifically how those intuitions … Read more
Dear Committee Members, specifically Chairman Green, I would like to know why, in numerous published statements, Chairman Green has claimed that Anna Giaritelli published a “groundbreaking scoop showing that the criminal cartels had hijacked the CBP One app using virtual private networks (VPNs), and were exploiting the app to make even more money by scheduling … Read more
My review of the mobile app, CBP One™: The Border in Your Pocket, considered factors in the development of CBP One’s facial recognition engine, the Traveler Verification Service (TVS), that render it unsuitable for CBP One’s current usage in collecting information from migrants at the border. This post takes a closer look at how CBP … Read more