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Russia’s Creepy, Innovative Internet [video]
- supergreg 10y agoIs it supposed to be a video? Because I'm not seeing it. Is it behind a paywall?
- stephengillie 10y ago> But the most stunning—and creepiest—software developed in Russia is something called FindFace. It’s an app that lets you take a picture of a stranger and then almost instantly, using a facial-recognition algorithm, find the person on a social network. If you’re hoping the software doesn’t work that well, you’ll be disappointed: When I tested the app, it found the right faces all the freaking time. Privacy is so 2015. Still waiting for social networks to search for you on other social networks, to verify your identify. We're sorry, this photo doesn't match your face in photos on other social media, so we can't add it to your profile.
- slv77 10y agoAny idea how these applications are built and trained? My assumptions are that the process is scraping social networks for tagged pictures; identifying and standardizing faces and then training a CNN network to identify individuals. The trouble is wrapping my head around how to do that at the scale needed to uniquely identify 20M+ individuals. Do they train the CNNs in smaller batches and run the models in parallel? How do they normalize the results? How do the add incremental data?
- vinay427 10y agoThey could just be using a feature space for face representations that a model is trained to generate given images, which would reduce the identification problem to a n-dimensional clustering problem. I'm not as familiar with the models in face recognition but something analogous to word2vec may produce reasonable results.
- deepnotderp 10y agoMy guess is that they use siamese cnns or autoencoders and look at the latent space. Also, just straight up training a deep neural network on 20 million classes isn't impossible. We've developed an in house technique that greatly accelerates this. Keep your eyes peeled on arxiv for a publication soon ;)
- photogrammetry 10y agoWhat authors should we be looking for?
- dotancohen 10y agoDeep, Derp, et al.
- deepnotderp 10y ago:)
- deepnotderp 10y agoTapabrata Ghosh
- deepnotderp 10y agoAlso, the essence of it is sampling the "labels" (the people's face ID) similar to Word2Vec through similarity. When applied to people's face ID, the key phrase is "In feature space, faces of a feather flock together". Then, use a recurrent ConvNet at the end to pump out probabilities for each class (in this case face) with a low/tractable number of parameters.
- kimshibal 10y agoВКонтакте already has this internal tool
- stephengillie 10y agoThey won't let you update your photo unless it's similar to your photo on other social networks?
- EugeneOZ 10y agoImportant to note: main usage of this app is cyberbullying and chantage.
- al2o3cr 10y agoI'd be curious to see whether the network used has similar issues to the ones explored here: http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling for recognizing ImageNet images.
- BooglyWoo 10y agoI believe this problem is common to many types of machine learning classifiers (not even just neural nets). See the discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8721650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8721650
- dragonbonheur 10y agoOn Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tICL-lwI7KM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tICL-lwI7KM
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dkarapetyan 10y agoMany of the really good software engineers I know are Russian. As in they grew up and were educated in Russia but they all end up working for U.S. companies. Russia is missing out on a lot of talent right in their back yard. If the government was a little more forward thinking and didn't try to stifle and control things so much who knows where they would be right now.
- akiselev 10y agoNot just the Russian trained software engineers but a lot of children and grandchildren of the 1990s Eastern Bloc immigrants are lost to Russia. These were the families most likely to have access to computers and educational institutions no matter which country they stayed in but widespread oppression pre- and post-USSR by antisemites, thugs, corrupt bureaucrats, etc and an economic collapse robbed the country of much of the talent pool.
- olegious 10y agoI'm one of those immigrant children that arrived in SF in the early 90s, now having grown up in SF and found success here, I'm actually looking at moving back to work in tech in Moscow. There is an energy there that I haven't felt anywhere else, hopefully the geopolitical situation will settle down over the next few years to make it a reality.
- gtirloni 10y agoWhere/How would you start looking for a job there? Do you know if Skolkovo is still a thing there?
- Fremis 10y agoSkolkovo is a big bullshit, not even close to Silicon Valley. They did nothing useful and have spent a lot of budget money for nothing.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
- icpmacdo 10y agoThere seems to be so much vaporware around AI currently. It seems like theres a fair bit of it in this episode. Apart from that I thought it was a great doc.
- dschuetz 10y agoIt seems like Russia's tech is having innovation spikes here and there, but it just seems so. I haven't seen any original ideas in that documentary. Everything is a copycat of some idea someone else had in Europe or in the Americas. They took it and made it far better, but for a very limited market. They exercise the same principles Steven Jobs had used for his designs: find cheap shit (or get paid by the gov), make it golden, sell it. That's also why the Russian nuclear institute looked like a trash dump in the video. You can't sell nuclear science to people. Not with a logo on it, you can't. But, who knows. Never underestimate the idle mind of a Russian. It's dangerous.
- diego_moita 10y agoI felt the same: lots of very good engineering but not a lot of open, competitive, creative and free capitalism. Even China does a lot better than just copycat. However, it seems that most people reading this thread are from the Родина (rodina: motherland) and get offended by objective criticism about Russia.
- shade23 10y agoCan we have the original article titles (or non-click-bait derivatives) for HN. This one is not entirely disconnected.But just for Informational sanity.
- fsiefken 10y agoDoes anyone know the name of the Russian choir song at minute 16 of the documentary? I want to use it for the background song when individual factions reach the Factory in Scythe (parallel universe board game). https://youtu.be/tICL-lwI7KM?t=930 https://youtu.be/tICL-lwI7KM?t=930 One piece of software I am very impressed by is Dmitry Shkarin's Durilca, a very fast and efficient file compressor, topping the benchmark charts. I wonder what he's doing now. And if I'm not mistaken Eltech's Exagear (close to native i386 binary emulation on Arm) was made by Russian programmers too.
- achikin 10y agoThe song is called "Болящий дух врачует песнопенье", but I could not find the choir version. Good luck with that!
- eternalban 10y ago> background song when individual factions reach the Factory ... I'm sure you'll find something here: http://sovmusic.ru http://sovmusic.ru [p.s. english: http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/index.php http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/index.php]
- lambdadmitry 10y agoDisclaimer: didn't watch the video, read the text. At least in the text the author seemingly misses an important theme: there is a rising gloom in the Russian techscene lately. Talented programmers are mostly open-minded and keen to the western perspective, so the recent (~2012) turn in Russian politics was (and is) morally hard for a lot of them. All hopes for modernization, "westernization", and brighter future in the next decade were shattered, most startups now look for either government or government-associated funding. Like, the only way the founders of that creepy FindFace startup were going to monetize is to sell it to siloviks. The economic downturn also plays its role. The future isn't bright around here.
- guard-of-terra 10y agoHe doesn't miss it, it's right there after the first (mail.ru) block.
- lambdadmitry 10y agoAh, now I see! Sorry for repeating the author then, thought it may be interesting for someone to have a fuller picture. Thank you for the heads up! Edit: seems someone thought it was sarcastic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (it wasn't)
- kushti 10y agoTalented programmers are surely open-minded, but not necessarily pro-western, moving away from millennial bubbles in central parts of megapolises (even the bubbles imagine their pro-Western vector in a very unclear form, which is pretty understandable considering Western discourse is not monotonic at all, so its hard to follow it without a clear definition social media youth lacks generally). About funding, I'm not sure at all, probably it's not much different from 2011, are any links behind the claims?
- lambdadmitry 10y ago>not necessarily pro-western To be honest I don't see how this claim can be compatible with your disagreement on funding. Startups are either SV-style (free market above everything, private VCs, fierce competition) or China-style (heavy government involvement at all stages, from funding to market regulations). So you are either "pro-western" or pro-govt-funded "VC". It is true that there are people with paternalistic view of the government, and all the talk about "import substitution" favors them, but that's exactly the point I was making: the future is gloom here for people with a classic startup culture.
- nx11x 10y agoArticles and the comments they spawn are a bit weird, honestly. Let's talk about face recognition tech in Russia, and how creepy it makes them. Meanwhile it's not creepy at all that "Half of American Adults Are in Police Facial-Recognition Databases": http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/half-of-american-adults-are-in-police-facial-recognition-databases/504560/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/half-o...
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoThere's an obvious difference between law enforcement having these powers (and we can assume Russian law enforcement does too) and Joe Schmoe having these powers. As Russians have already said in this thread, the main use of this is blackmail and cyberbullying. It certainly is an abused feature. I think the typical "whataboutism" here is distracting from the main issue.
- diego_moita 10y agoI did see some very solid engineering there. But I didn't see any meaningful product or business model innovation. As the documentary shows, most companies there are either replicating western business models, or doing what the government orders or allows them to do. Russian engineers are phenomenal but their entrepreneurs don't see either creative of free to create. Compare them to Chinese entrepreneurs. In China they don't restrict themselves to copy western businesses. They adapt to very Chinese cultural habits like having chat engines on online shopping such that you can interact with sellers or even haggle and bargain when shopping. It's what Jack Ma called being "the crocodile in the Yang-Tse": being specific to a culture, understand your customers instead of standardizing them. Do Russians do the same? The video didn't show that. What it showed is how much Russian capitalism is a pet of the Kremlin.