175
AI discovers that not every fingerprint is unique
(techxplore.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
175 points (88.2% liked)
Technology
34805 readers
207 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
The research is bogus then as well. Projections like those have been in wide use at police stations around the globe at least since my cousin bragged about having this when he started his police training. That was.2008.
I mean, the research is the research and the data is the data.
If there are specific critiques to the methodology of the research that calls the validity of the observed data into question, that's fair. "It's 'well known' that..." Isn't a scientific argument. It's actually the exact opposite, it's literally religion.
Also, the conclusions being drawn from the data by the researchers or 3rd parties might be a problem.
To be fair, ML of today is unrecognizable to what it was in 2008. And, I'd be willing to bet the model your cousin was exposed to wasn't a machine learning model, and instead some handcrafted marker analysis with dubious justification but a great sales team.
The great thing about ML science is that it's super accessible. This was an undergrad project. The next step, to establish the validity, really just requires a larger data set. If it's bogus, that'll come out. If it's valid, that'll come out too. The cost of reproducibility is so low that even hobbiests can verify the results.
My cousin wasn't using any ML model. Their software probably did a geometric projection and that's it. Then they'd search for the proposed owner of the fingerprint and get the real ones to compare against. That's something that ML models cannot take from police as long as long as hallucinating is possible.
Right, so this methodology is a completely different approach. I don't think it's fair to call snake oil on this specifically with the justification that other models (using an entirely different approach) were.
Again, not saying it's real or not, I'm just saying that it's appropriate to try new approaches to examine things we already THINK we know, and to be prepared to carefully and fairly evaluate new data that calls into question things we thought we knew. That's just science.