Awesome, not awesome.

#Awesome
"Although certain celebrities are widely considered to be nice-looking, beauty does still ultimately lie in the eye of the beholder. A new AI-based system is able to ascertain which features are found most attractive by individual people, and then create faces combining those qualities." - Ben Coxworth Learn More from New Atlas >

#Not Awesome
"Hackers have broken into Verkada, a popular surveillance and facial recognition camera company, and managed to access live feeds of thousands of cameras across the world, as well as siphon a Verkada customer list. The breach shows the astonishing reach of facial recognition-enabled cameras in ordinary workplaces, bars, parking lots, schools, stores, and more." - Jason Koebler & Joseph Cox Learn More from Vice >

What we're reading.

1/ None of the teams that work on Facebook’s news feed, ad service, or other products are required to test the algorithms for fairness. Learn More from MIT Technology Review >

2/ Biographer Walter Isaacson accuses Facebook and Twitter's algorithms of getting people to feel enraged and pass on misinformation. Learn More from yahoo! entertainment >

3/ AI systems that require humans to be "in the loop," adding input, will make algorithms more understanding of the people they serve. Learn More from MIT News >

4/ To get around the limits of biased datasets and avoid violating privacy, companies generate synthetic data to train machine learning models. Learn More from Axios >

5/ A new machine learning algorithm will help self-driving cars navigate humans doing adversarial things like blocking car sensors and vandalizing signs. Learn More from MIT News >

6/ Personal finance apps use machine learning to detect anomalies in your bills and bank statements to save you money. Learn More from The New York Times >

7/ Facial recognition systems used in Myanmar can be used to empower abusive military leadership. Learn More from Human Rights Watch >

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14/03/21 View this email in your browser