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An AI Lie Detector Is Going to Start Questioning Travelers in the EU

atlasunshrugged 8y ago
I wonder what the effect on the human border agents will be if this system is popularized - will it be something like "self-driving" cars where people start falling asleep at the wheel even though the tech isn't there yet (I suppose in this scenario it means that people who are lying are seen as telling the truth and they just get waved by by border control)
deft 8y ago
Why are lie detectors legal and why were they ever used for anything? We know they don't work. And we know this one won't work any better, because now they've just put the work of sentiment analysis on "AI" vs. a "trained expert".
- bufferoverflow 8y ago
  How do you know AI lie detectors don't work?
  - rspeer 8y ago
    Because there is no plausible existing technology by which it would. And it's a similar promise to a lot of other over-promising AI technologies that don't work, like "fake news detectors".
    - bufferoverflow 8y ago
      "Because there is no plausible existing technology by which it would" And how do you know that?
      - frankharv 8y ago
        Because I read HackerNews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18155548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18155548
      - frankharv 8y ago
        The polygraph is as useful at catching lies as the Scientologist E-Meter (1) is to testing religion conviction. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets/E-Meter/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets/E-Meter/
        aptwebapps 8y ago
        This isn't a polygraph. The article calls it a lie detector and we call polygraph tests lie detectors but the claimed mechanism here is a bit different. I'm not for it, but it's not a polygraph as described.
        bufferoverflow 8y ago
        Except this is new tech, and your only argument is that the old tech doesn't work, which I agree with.
        realusername 8y ago
        This isn't new tech, it's going to use micro-gestures which is a questionable science. AI does not mean anything, you need inputs.
        monkeynotes 8y ago
        This is an interesting article[1], the opinion of the author is that no reliable studies have been conducted as to if humans can detect deceit at all. He is skeptical that machines can deduce deceit using micro expressions. Quote: "Looking for cues to deception merely from ephemeral facial micro-expressions is questionable and likely fruitless. Micro gestures may be indicative of internal emotional turmoil that is being suppressed, but that is it. The distinguished Paul Ekman, who in fact coined the term micro - expression has stated in his book Telling Lies that micro expressions are rare and they "don't occur that often" (Ekman 1985, 131, 165). Plus as others have said, there is no single behavior indicative of deception (Matsumoto et. al., 2011, 1-4). I am concerned that machines that focus solely on the face will no doubt miss other information from the body (sweating, jittery hand, etc.) or generate lots of false positives because negative emotions abound especially where such machines are intended such as airports (stress of travel, stress of being subjected to searches, or inconvenient interviews, etc) or in a police setting." [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/spycatcher/201203/the-truth-about-lie-detection https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/spycatcher/201203/th...
  - realusername 8y ago
    Because there's no reliable way which you can tell if people lie or not, putting AI in front of it won't change any of that.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - denzil_correa 8y ago
    The "Burden of Proof" lies on the entity making a claim [0]. Besides, we do know that polygraphs don't work [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law) [1] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-polygraph-job-screening-black-mirror/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-polygraph-job-screening-b...
    - lucb1e 8y ago
      We know that a polygraph does not work, but how do we know that this won't work without real-world data? And nobody is being accused of anything, there is no burden of proof involved yet. If you mean that we can't subject someone to a lie detector while asking questions, i.e. we cannot subject anyone to anything without a reasonable suspicion, then we couldn't have airport security at all unless someone tweeted "today's plane is gonna be da bomb!" Which would be a lot better than the current state of things in the USA, but that's not how this works.
  - Jmcdd 8y ago
    Because _we know_ that AI lie detectors can't currently prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone is lying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens's_razor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens's_razor
- darawk 8y ago
  Why do you think these won't work? I would think they have a dataset that they're validating them on if they're calling it "AI". I think it's unlikely that they'll be perfect, but they may very well be good enough to filter people for further, more intensive screening.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Why do you think these won't work? I would think they have a dataset that they're validating them on if they're calling it "AI". You'd be surprised. AI is just a catch-all marketing term, see for example IBM's Watson umbrella brand, that's sold like advanced AI but has had tons of fiascos, and is shown to be different sets of often simplistic implementations. E.g: https://www.massdevice.com/report-ibm-watson-delivered-unsafe-and-inaccurate-cancer-recommendations/ https://www.massdevice.com/report-ibm-watson-delivered-unsaf... https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/artificial-intelligence/layoffs-at-watson-health-reveal-ibms-problem-with-ai https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/artificial-i... https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17619382/ibms-watson-cancer-ai-healthcare-science https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17619382/ibms-watson-canc...
    - darawk 8y ago
      You're saying these things won't work because IBM misused the word 'AI'?
      - notahacker 8y ago
        No, he's saying that we've seen all kinds of absolute garbage marketed using the words 'AI' (Watson is at the relatively complex and useful end of the spectrum) so your suggestion that this project's use of 'AI' as a marketing term implies anything about whether they have an adequate dataset to validate it on is frankly hilarious. In this case, there's excellent reason to be sceptical about whether the service has a remotely adequate dataset, because even if lie detection were a simple problem, how on earth are you going to get calibration data involving hundreds of data points of real airline passengers lying about having weapons in their luggage or intending to overstay their visa? Never mind calibration data by gender, ethnicity and nationality...
- sschueller 8y ago
  Because movies show them as working and the general public is uniformed. Same goes for forensic tools that are actually possible compared to what TV shows like CSI show. Iraq and other countries purchases millions of dollars worth of phony bomb detectors. Something anyone with a bit of science education can debunk. Look at all the things on Kickstarter that are obvious pipedreams or scams yet people invest.
  - dsego 8y ago
    Reminds of local towns buying expensive “smart benches” that really no one uses. Easy way to spend some tax-payer money and give the appearance of investing into sophisticated technology, when it's all cheap off the shelf components from China.
  - biglenny 8y ago
    >Iraq and other countries purchases millions of dollars worth of phony bomb detectors. Something anyone with a bit of science education can debunk. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/fake-bomb-detectors-iraq https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/fake-bomb-detectors-... This is a hilarious read.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      This is not hilarious, it's appaling. The person selling this and people buying this are intentionally putting a lot of other people's lives at risk. I fully believe all involved parties should be tried for something at the level of attempted homicide.
- Krasnol 8y ago
  They make a good headline. In this case the Goverments of those countries love headlines that are related to their borders. AI guarding your border sells.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  Five years of reading HN and I’ve seen comments from all sorts of people. Former inmates, drug addicts, surgeons, lawyers, mechanics, welders, astrophysicist, particle physicists, pilots. Need I go on? Not once have I read anyone here who’s admitted to being a high level politician.
  - hartator 8y ago
    Never thought about it but you’re right.
  - ngcazz 8y ago
    Forgive me for being thick, but is your point that we'd need to have a politician's insight to understand the decision?
    - roenxi 8y ago
      To paraphrase, the question was "why is this legal when we all know it won't work?" and the answer was "we aren't the people who write the laws".
      - ngcazz 8y ago
        Makes sense! Thanks.
      - sbhn 8y ago
        Its legal when a whole bunch of suits standing behind the politician who uses there media priveledge to amplify an issue, are able to syphon without scrutiny, as many tax paying dollars as possible.
        stochastic_monk 8y ago
        It’s not so much about the fact that taxes are levied as that there is a lack of accountability for how it’s used.
- 131012 8y ago
  Hey, the first iteration "was only tested on 30 people". It must work for sure. (Seriously, wtf, 30 people?!?)
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    I hope the test set included politicians - you need to have some subjects who are verifiably liars.
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  Even if they did work, it would be awful. Our society was built on large amounts of discretion being exercised by law enforcement and the ability to convincingly lie to law enforcement. Society is going to get flipped on its head if we are able to detect total truth, and enforce all laws with 100% effectiveness. Even worse when these tools will be mostly in the hands of the government, and not the people.
  - del82 8y ago
    > Our society was built on large amounts of discretion being exercised by law enforcement This I get. > and the ability to convincingly lie to law enforcement. This less so. Can you elaborate?
    - unethical_ban 8y ago
      Sometimes, law enforcement can only be lenient (the first part of my original post can only hold) if it's "on the record" that you say something excusable. The LEO might know it's probably a lie, but either they understand a circumstance doesn't merit citation, or they know it's a crappy law. If everything were some day 100% honest, the polite niceties of "oh sorry didn't see the speed limit change" or "Forgot I left my pocket knife in carryon, sorry" would go away. Of course these are only two of countless examples.
      - thfuran 8y ago
        Eliminating the shit laws is a much better solution than ignoring them or working around them with lies.
        perl4ever 8y ago
        It seems to me that the concept is basically analogous to the idea people have that we should eliminate the human element from contract enforcement. Or suppose we tried to eliminate all tolerances and slippage in engineering. It's utopian/dystopian and even seriously attempting it would be disastrous, in my opinion. I don't see why people need to touch the hot stove to understand that.
- guy98238710 8y ago
  I have seen my algorithm outperform me by a large margin at something I am an expert in. The task was a highly ambiguous visual analysis. The trick is that humans focus too much on strong signals. Algorithms are much better at correctly aggregating lots of weak signals.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Did the evaluation of algorithm's superior performance included both false positives and false negatives? Personally, I don't like the concept of deploying algorithms for which we don't understand how they work, in scenarios of high health or social impact. It's cute to deploy DNNs to classify cat pictures, as when - not if - it spectacularly fails, nothing of value is lost. But if you can't point at the verified model the algorithm follows, or at least trace the algorithm after the fact, understanding and assessing every step it took, then that algorithm has no place in making decisions about people's lives.
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  Another thing that occurs to me, especially given recent publicity, is how this affects privacy. There are some/many things that are private and which you do not want the government or corporations to know. It is outside criminal actions and therefore none of their business, but if lie detectors become omnipresent, then it will become more and more tempting to use them everywhere to make things "more efficient" and to start everyone and their dog to asking more and more things that are none of their business.
- samirm 8y ago
  Repeated lie detector tests do work for most people. It's silly to think that your average joe is trained to control his/her biological responses to that extent. 1 lie detector test never works, a lot of them do.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  I can see the point of trials: as the article says, people told to lie will act very differently from people who want to lie, and a bunch of real-world data versus some lab data is surely going to improve it. I am not convinced that there is nothing about a person that gives away, at least in a good number of cases, whether someone is lying. I'm just wondering if it's too much to hope that they'll base the decision whether to implement it beyond the trial on data and not on marketing. And there is of course the argument that it should be possible, albeit with a lot of effort and/or a reasonable punishment, to break the law. (If this was impossible, we'd never get out of regimes we don't agree with, and with the advance of technology I'm afraid we're heading somewhere where a small group is actually able to oppress a huge number of people.)
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Though they are not perfectly accurate, they are generally indicative, so it's useful in a statistical game. Border agents are trained to look for all sorts of things, none of which make you guilty, but a few of which may make you suitable for more questions or a quick search. So I'd imagine it'll get used in the same context.
Canada 8y ago
Just like the evil TSA imaging systems, best thing to do is refuse to participate.
- kranner 8y ago
  I imagine it will not be optional when it is out of the experimental phase.
  - rasteau 8y ago
    The electronic strip search machines are still optional; they'll (eventually) give you a pat down instead.
  - Canada 8y ago
    What can they do? Strap you in front of it like it’s clockwork orange? You can refuse to respond to it. Cover your face with your hand and say “operator operator operator” or some other nonsense. Say it’s creepy or ridiculous to talk to such a thing. They will let you go.
    - kranner 8y ago
      If it's mandatory if you want to enter the EU (as a non-citizen), I'd guess they would deny you entry.
      - travelbuffoon 8y ago
        Nope. It's for customs, not immigration. You're already in the country, they just need to figure out whether they need to search your bags for contraband.
        stale2002 8y ago
        So then if you refuse to answer they will just search your bags.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
I always feel a bit sorry for the rubber stamp monkeys sitting at the border control in the US. They are so fucked at so many levels that isn't funny any more. For starters, their job is purely symbolic as it is unlikely anyone that shouldn't be there would get that far: it would imply multiple levels of failure in several agencies: you traveled internationally and were profiled, checked, and triple checked before you even arrived at your gate. They are bureaucratic ass coverage with little practical real life value. What little value there is has more to do with controlling migration than any security. Domestically, many airlines already have automated checkins (including luggage dropoff in some places), automated boarding, and in some places automated passport checks at immigration. The last human hurdle is security screening, which is mostly theater at this point. So, automated screening of travelers at the beginning of their journey makes a lot of sense. Mostly it's just confirming the obvious: are they who they claim they are (i.e. does the person showing up match the automated profile available already, are there any red flags warranting extra attention) and are they carrying anything they should not be carrying. Like AI already outperforming physicians in the job of scanning medical images for anomalies, surely state of the art luggage scanners are also outperforming humans (probably by magnitudes). Add to that some screening for clear markers that somebody's behavior is a bit off and you have basically automated away security staff likely to miss those signals because they are human beings that get tired, stressed, bored, distracted, biased, etc. So the combined checks of identity, profiling, automated luggage scans and escalation to humans in case of any doubt should be vastly more efficient. The default case should be zero humans involved with the whole process. When it escalates, you still get the humans in the loop that are then a lot more effective because they already know there were some red flags. This stuff will initially perform quite poorly probably. But it will still be worth it in identifying the "definitely not lying, don't waste your time on this" category of travelers.
- dr_teh 8y ago
  " But it will still be worth it in identifying the "definitely not lying, don't waste your time on this" category of travelers." That is absolutely not how any of this works, at all.
travelbuffoon 8y ago
Significant note: this appears to be a customs screening, not immigration screening. Which makes perfect sense since it's extremely hard for customs agents to actually catch smugglers. (Compared to immigration screening which is largely based on hard criteria which human agents evaluate with much less leeway.) The bigger question is whether it's effective - but anything is likely to be more effective than customs agents selecting people to search based on gut feeling.
- illiac_1962 8y ago
  The Israelis claim profiling is very effective.
qwerty456127 8y ago
This is outrageous. I always feel extremely anxious (and in such a case I would also feel angry) and try to imitate I'm not by playing Mr. Spock + smile when passing border (or any other) checks although I'm neither a smuggler nor a terrorist (but have some impostor syndrome). Such a device will probably notice this and put me in problems.
- kilroy123 8y ago
  I agree. It is a high anxiety-producing situation, even though I'm doing nothing wrong. I travel yearly to other countries and I still get very stressed.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    I would imagine crosssing a border is the only interaction most people ever have with law enforcement.
    - dagw 8y ago
      Or at least the only adversarial interaction.
      - chrisseaton 8y ago
        I don't think I've ever spoken to an on-duty police officer in my life.
      - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        Crossing the border isn't adversarial. A speeding ticket isn't adversarial (usually, unless you make it that way). They're just routine transactions. A "driving while X", a terry stop or other fishing expedition type stop is adversarial. Occasionally we have comment threads on HN that remind me how far removed a lot people here are from these issues and it does not make me confident that there will be improvement in my lifetime. This comment thread is one of them. I don't support this AI thing at all but as far as problems with law enforcement go border agent's demeanor should be really far down the priority list. I'm all for things that put the issue on people's radar and I don't wanna come off as saying "but X is worse so we shouldn't care about Y" but this seems like a first world problem.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
naijabb 8y ago
We need the US embassies to use this. I have been denied visas three times because the interviewers feel I would not return to my home country. If this AI detector was used, at least they would know I am honest about just visiting the USA.
- dagw 8y ago
  AI can never be better than the training data you feed it. If videos of your interviews where used to train on how a 'liar' might behave, it will make the same mistakes as the human interviewers.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    E.g. amazon resume sifting ai https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...
atupis 8y ago
"iBorderCtrl team, said that they are “quite confident” they can bring the accuracy rate up to 85 percent." Magical 85 percent accuracy. so it is basically toy.
- captainbland 8y ago
  So what like one in six or seven people will be incorrectly flagged as lying? That's just silly, it'd be a total circus trying to use it.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Well, in particular, suppose 1 out of 100 people is lying at the border. Send 10k people over the border, 100 are lying, 9900 aren't. With 85% accuracy, 85 of liars are flagged as lying (correctly), and 15% x 9900 = 1485 of non-liars are flagged as lying (incorrectly). Thus, a bit more than 5% of people flagged as lying are actually lying, while nearly 95% of people flagged are innocent. This is not even taking into account the possibility that hardened criminals might be less nervous than somewhat anxious normal people. Enjoy your border crossings, everyone. EDIT: fix italics EDIT to add: And that's after they get the accuracy up to 85%. And unless accuracy is defined somewhat differently.
    - cporios 8y ago
      > With 85% accuracy, 85 of liars are flagged as lying (correctly), [...] This is not what accuracy means. 85% accuracy just means that 85% of all the decisions the system makes are correct. A system in such a setting, where a single false negative matters a lot more than a single false positive (which would simply be handed over to a human for further investigation) would necessarily be tuned for extremely high recall at the cost of precision. In other words, it would often flag innocent people for further investigation (as you've said), but it would almost never clear people that should've been flagged.
      - FabHK 8y ago
        Ah, yes, you're right. Thanks for correcting my misunderstanding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision#In_binary_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision#In_bina...
code4tee 8y ago
Doesn’t GDPR have a lot to say about the use of algorithms for decision making? This sort of thing of letting an ‘AI’ decide on its own what kind of airport experience you’re going to have seems to fly into the face of that.
- lotu 8y ago
  I don't think GDPR would prevent this I read though it for work before it was implemented I don't recall anything saying algorithms can't make decisions about people. Our company uses algorithms to decide what ad is displayed to people, and I'm not recalling anything that would make these diffrent under the law. Furthermore, I believe the government has been given broad exceptions from GDPR for anything related to doing government stuff. This is form of legitimate interest "processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;" It is in the public interest the border control laws be enforced and a manner that is both effective and minimized cost to the public, also this involves the exercise of official border control authority, therefore this is acceptable. (Standard reminder that if you are relying on the advice of a stranger for legal issues that matter you should get an attorney.)
  - mattlondon 8y ago
    I found this: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/rights-related-to-automated-decision-making-including-profiling/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da... It is interesting that there is a comment about explicit consent - I imagine this will be like the millimeter wave scanners: you can either go in and get your genitals imaged by some remote voyeur, or if you dont like that then you can get a thorough strip search by someone in blue gloves. Have a nice day :-)
presscast 8y ago
I wonder what its cost function is. I sure hope it's better than "get people to say inconsistent things", as I'd expect that to produce a system that is optimized to trip people up.
albertgoeswoof 8y ago
Couldn’t we just use a random number generator instead?
- iguy 8y ago
  Some places do exactly this. I think the idea was that, with any kind of profiling, it would be easy for drug gangs to figure out who to use as mules. And with any judgement, they can pressurise the guy making the call. But a lottery machine everyone can see is harder to defeat.
varjag 8y ago
Anyone who ever dealt with a chat bot in customer support should be alarmed by this.
qwerty456127 8y ago
In general respect to human rights and privacy has always seemed an important part of the EU ideology. I just hope this a purely local initiative and the central EU government is going to intervene and stop this.
coldcode 8y ago
If we could make politicians have to pass an AI lie detector we build first, then I am for this. Firstly this will never happen, and secondly if for some reason it did we would then likely have no politicians.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  That might inadvertently select for politicians who believe what the voters want to hear over those who lie but know its a lie. Since the later want to get re-elected they'll quietly abandon the good-sounding-but-horrible plans they talked about to get into office but the former will actually try to carry them out.
tinus_hn 8y ago
Border checkpoints in the Schengen zone, which is most of the EU, are forbidden.
- logifail 8y ago
  Reality check: tell that to the German border police who are standing on the A93 motorway at Kiefersfelden eyeballing every single driver entering Germany from Austria. There's more than a whiff of Checkpoint Charlie about the place (portakabins installed directly on what was the motorway surface, concrete traffic calming measures, 5 km/h speed limit, armed police, more police sitting in chase car should anyone decide not to stop, floodlit at night) I'm sure it's worth it, what with Austria and Germany sharing a fairly long land border which is more or less completely unsecured. Side roads - of which there are plenty - don't get checked much either. <rolls eyes>
antpls 8y ago
"which cost the EU a little more than $5 million" Well, I didn't know my taxes were used to build such systems. It would have been really more acceptable if they sold the system as a simple chat bot that records what you says, in case you are involved in a case later. But the "lie detector" part is scary and this is the typical instance that Elon Musk warned against. I don't understand how academics accepted to work on that.
apo 8y ago
"Lie detection" is probably just the beginning. Think of what could be done by combining this system with facial recognition. Deployed widely enough, this system could build a personalized profile for each individual, mapping emotional state to times and locations, or more crudely it could be used for racial profiling.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
StavrosK 8y ago
What the hell? This is completely unacceptable, who voted this in? I'm not so much concerned about this system, which is a complete joke and is never going to work, as much as I am concerned by the fact that some people thought this was acceptable enough to actually deploy.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Looks like the commission is running this as a pilot. As always your contact will be via your MEP, who appoints the commission president (based on the fact the EPP was the largest party in 2014 and Junker was the presidential candidate of that party)
  - antpls 8y ago
    And also, don't forget to register yourself on the voter lists for the EU's 2019 election! The countries in which the pilot takes place were mainly EPP (odd correlation...?) By the way, direct links to newpress release and project page, which lists involved countries : - http://ec.europa.eu/research/infocentre/article_en.cfm?artid=49726 http://ec.europa.eu/research/infocentre/article_en.cfm?artid... - https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/202703_en.html https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/202703_en.html
modzu 8y ago
OBEY
- modzu 8y ago
  lets spell it out then https://obeygiant.com/propaganda/manifesto/ https://obeygiant.com/propaganda/manifesto/
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
Not to put a fine point on it, but "the team at iBorderCtrl" are charlatans. Their system is supposed to detect lying from facial expressions. The only kind of "science" purporting to back this possibility is the work of the psychologist, Paul Ekman, which is based on flimsy evidence at best. A gigantic hint that this "research" is a bunch of hooey is his claim to have identified 29 "wizzards of deception detection" [1]- in very, very literal terms those are people with the magickal power to tell when someone is lying just by looking at their face (and magickally perceiving revealing facial expressions, subconsciously). The iBorderCtrl system might indeed be replaced by a wizzard, or, why not be more inclusive, a witch, with a magick wand pointed to the traveller, while questions are being asked of them. If the traveller is telling the truth, the wand will jump up, if they're lying it will dive down. The witch is not moving the wand! She's only channeling the MAGICK! The same magick being channelled by this revolting misuse of technology for the most odious purpose imaginable. It is not a coincidence that this "prototype" is being deployed in Hungary, the country in the EU that has embraced populist, xenophobic tendencies as no other, having elected a master of the craft, Viktor Orbán, as a prime minister and head of government. This is such utter, utter bullshit. I cannot believe that the Commission agreed to all this. What the fucking fuck. ___________ [1] http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/on_lie_detection_wizards..pdf http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/o...
- mschuster91 8y ago
  > I cannot believe that the Commission agreed to all this. I can. I mean, the driving forces in the EU got extremely xenophobic. Italy is ruled by the fascist Salvini, the PiS in Poland are not far behind Orban, the UK government has been xenophobic for decades, France suffers from xenophobia too (after the terror attacks, though) and our own Horst Seehofer risked collapsing the German government over (literally) 0 migrants (per https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/seehofers-deal-zahlen-der-bundesregierung-zeigen-wie-nutzlos-das-fluechtlings-abkommen-mit-spanien-ist_id_9399400.html https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/seehofers-deal-zahl...)... What are human rights, what is democracy worth, when there is no one left to enforce them? The EU won't do shit against Hungary, Poland or Italy (as there is a 100% consensus required!), the US under Trump are going isolationist and trampling on human rights wherever they can, and the UN Security Council is powerless against the stuff that Russia, China, Saudi-Arabia etc. do because there's always a veto power that bails out their "friends".
contravariant 8y ago
>The virtual agent is reportedly customized according to the traveler’s gender, ethnicity, and language. That all just seems to be fancy way of saying it's discriminatory and racist.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  In that case a system programmed not to recommend vaginal checkups to men is sexist? I can totally imagine that different genders lie differently, and if it turns out that they don't (or that different ethnicities don't or whatever), great, one model fewer to maintain right?
leephillips 8y ago
As if getting through an airport isn't bad enough, now in these locations we will have to submit to a pseudoscientific farce. (Polygraphs, that record more detailed physiological data, in concert with a human interpreter, fail to "detect deceit". Clearly this system, which the article says was tested on 30 people before deployment, will produce random results.)
misiti3780 8y ago
7 years ago, I worked on a government contract (not S,TS) trying to build a lie detector using computer vision and the research done by Paul Ekman (from the book Blink). After a few years of building models, we determined that it would be impossible to build an effective detector. I wonder if the research has changed.
- sebazzz 8y ago
  Perhaps they use machine learning for this. Was that used in your project?
  - misiti3780 8y ago
    yes we used a combination PCA for feature extraction and then SVMs and logistic regression for classification.
    - dr_zoidberg 8y ago
      Translation for those unfamiliar: they used machine learning. And while SVM is not "advanced enough" compared to "deep learning"[0], it's a very powerfull classificator/estimator on its own. To OP: maybe today with a huge GPU, lots of data and more complex models you could get something going. Do you think a more advanced model could really pull this through? Maybe using other features -- perhaps coupling with a thermal camera can help detect changes in temperature that could signal the person is lying. [0] quotes because I've heard this complaint a few times already, and it's usually from people that have bought the buzzword but usually don't understand much about machine learning in general.
      - misiti3780 8y ago
        I havn’t been following this story really closely today, but here is my two sense (albeit outdated): In the research I was working on, there were two types of deception/lies: high stakes (aka suicide bomber or shoe bomber) and low states (you have a pound of cocaine strapped to your leg). If you want to build a lie detector on facial data, you need consider things like 1. It is important to have a robust data set that contains lots of example of both for training and cross-validation 2. False positives can be very expensive (because you start pulling people aside, lines build up, people get pissed, etc) The project I worked on was trying to solve a specific problem: replace Behavior detection officers [1]: These are people that sit inconspicuously at the TSA checkpoints and decide who gets to get pulled aside for further screening and who goes through (I do know anything else about what they do and where they are, numbers etc.) Their training is advanced, laborious, and expensive for TSA. They are, of course, trying to catch terrorists (aka the high stakes lies) but in reality they are dealing with the low stakes lies. The only terrorist I can think of since 9/11 that got close to taking down a plane was Richard Reid, and they missed him so they seem to be 0/1 in high states lies). Anyways, the problem with building their replacement is we do not have a lot of good examples of high stakes lies in video data. There are some (Scott Peterson, etc) but not enough. Also, the models they were built off of were "micro-expression" [2] detectors, and micro-expressions show up differently across cultures (maybe the consensus has changed since I was modeling this stuff) . So, in short, the project I was on failed because the data sucked and even if we did build a model, it was overfit to the data we trained it on. I am not sure how deep learning and more advanced GPUs would solve that. Maybe they found better data, but I would be skeptical. I honestly would be surprised if they actually did much better than random (ROC > .5) Sorry for the rambling - end of the day for me on the east coast. [1] https://www.tsa.gov/news/testimony/2013/11/14/tsa-behavior-detection-and-analysis-program https://www.tsa.gov/news/testimony/2013/11/14/tsa-behavior-d... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microexpression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microexpression
badosu 8y ago
Seems like the perfect strawman for recording face recognition data use in surveillance...
llalie92 8y ago
There's a lot of skepticism in this thread. I've actually researched this a bit and there is research suggesting AI-based lie detection to be possible. It will need a multimodal approach where it's more than just video images though. Also, the use case of border control is a great application. There's a lot of misunderstanding in this thread. The AI screening is just a first screening, and if someone fails that, then they go to a human. So moderate false positive rates are acceptable. The commentators on this thread generally make a few mistakes: assuming lie detectors won't work because polygraphs don't work, assuming the border control use case needs to be perfect or not have false positives (it doesn't), assuming Paul Ekman's microexpressions are all that iBorderCtrl is basing their research on (I agree Ekman's research is questionable, and I don't know what exactly iBorderCtrl is doing, but it seems highly likely they're doing more than just looking for microexpressions), assuming racist intent or that it'll just flag non-Europeans as liars.
- driverdan 8y ago
  > there is research suggesting AI-based lie detection to be possible [citation needed]
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  Yes, of course there is skepticism in the thread. The claim being made is completely ridiculous. I would be very surprised if the "research suggesting AI-based lie detection to be possible" that you mention is from anyone who has any sort of reputation to protect. Machine learning scientists, the vast majority of, would not touch such obvious pseudo-scientific claptrap with a ten-foot pole. It's the kind of thing that tarnishes one's reputation and never washes off. And rightly so. I would not welcome, but grudingly accept, your references to the contrary. Also, if iBorderCtrl are not using Eckman's work, then what kind of theoretical framework are they basing their work on? Why is it "highlly likely they're doing more than just looking for microexpressions"? Where is all the science of detecting lies from looking at peoples' faces? And if they're not basing their work on someone's research, then what are they basing it on?
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
schoollunch 8y ago
notice it says "asses their report"

I wonder what the effect on the human border agents will be if this system is popularized - will it be something like "self-driving" cars where people start falling asleep at the wheel even though the tech isn't there yet (I suppose in this scenario it means that people who are lying are seen as telling the truth and they just get waved by by border control)

deft 8y ago

Why are lie detectors legal and why were they ever used for anything? We know they don't work. And we know this one won't work any better, because now they've just put the work of sentiment analysis on "AI" vs. a "trained expert".

bufferoverflow 8y ago
How do you know AI lie detectors don't work?
- rspeer 8y ago
  Because there is no plausible existing technology by which it would. And it's a similar promise to a lot of other over-promising AI technologies that don't work, like "fake news detectors".
  - bufferoverflow 8y ago
    "Because there is no plausible existing technology by which it would" And how do you know that?
    - frankharv 8y ago
      Because I read HackerNews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18155548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18155548
    - frankharv 8y ago
      The polygraph is as useful at catching lies as the Scientologist E-Meter (1) is to testing religion conviction. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets/E-Meter/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets/E-Meter/
      - aptwebapps 8y ago
        This isn't a polygraph. The article calls it a lie detector and we call polygraph tests lie detectors but the claimed mechanism here is a bit different. I'm not for it, but it's not a polygraph as described.
      - bufferoverflow 8y ago
        Except this is new tech, and your only argument is that the old tech doesn't work, which I agree with.
        realusername 8y ago
        This isn't new tech, it's going to use micro-gestures which is a questionable science. AI does not mean anything, you need inputs.
        monkeynotes 8y ago
        This is an interesting article[1], the opinion of the author is that no reliable studies have been conducted as to if humans can detect deceit at all. He is skeptical that machines can deduce deceit using micro expressions. Quote: "Looking for cues to deception merely from ephemeral facial micro-expressions is questionable and likely fruitless. Micro gestures may be indicative of internal emotional turmoil that is being suppressed, but that is it. The distinguished Paul Ekman, who in fact coined the term micro - expression has stated in his book Telling Lies that micro expressions are rare and they "don't occur that often" (Ekman 1985, 131, 165). Plus as others have said, there is no single behavior indicative of deception (Matsumoto et. al., 2011, 1-4). I am concerned that machines that focus solely on the face will no doubt miss other information from the body (sweating, jittery hand, etc.) or generate lots of false positives because negative emotions abound especially where such machines are intended such as airports (stress of travel, stress of being subjected to searches, or inconvenient interviews, etc) or in a police setting." [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/spycatcher/201203/the-truth-about-lie-detection https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/spycatcher/201203/th...
- realusername 8y ago
  Because there's no reliable way which you can tell if people lie or not, putting AI in front of it won't change any of that.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- denzil_correa 8y ago
  The "Burden of Proof" lies on the entity making a claim [0]. Besides, we do know that polygraphs don't work [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(law) [1] https://www.wired.com/story/inside-polygraph-job-screening-black-mirror/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-polygraph-job-screening-b...
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    We know that a polygraph does not work, but how do we know that this won't work without real-world data? And nobody is being accused of anything, there is no burden of proof involved yet. If you mean that we can't subject someone to a lie detector while asking questions, i.e. we cannot subject anyone to anything without a reasonable suspicion, then we couldn't have airport security at all unless someone tweeted "today's plane is gonna be da bomb!" Which would be a lot better than the current state of things in the USA, but that's not how this works.
- Jmcdd 8y ago
  Because _we know_ that AI lie detectors can't currently prove beyond reasonable doubt that someone is lying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens's_razor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens's_razor
darawk 8y ago
Why do you think these won't work? I would think they have a dataset that they're validating them on if they're calling it "AI". I think it's unlikely that they'll be perfect, but they may very well be good enough to filter people for further, more intensive screening.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Why do you think these won't work? I would think they have a dataset that they're validating them on if they're calling it "AI". You'd be surprised. AI is just a catch-all marketing term, see for example IBM's Watson umbrella brand, that's sold like advanced AI but has had tons of fiascos, and is shown to be different sets of often simplistic implementations. E.g: https://www.massdevice.com/report-ibm-watson-delivered-unsafe-and-inaccurate-cancer-recommendations/ https://www.massdevice.com/report-ibm-watson-delivered-unsaf... https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/artificial-intelligence/layoffs-at-watson-health-reveal-ibms-problem-with-ai https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/artificial-i... https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17619382/ibms-watson-cancer-ai-healthcare-science https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/26/17619382/ibms-watson-canc...
  - darawk 8y ago
    You're saying these things won't work because IBM misused the word 'AI'?
    - notahacker 8y ago
      No, he's saying that we've seen all kinds of absolute garbage marketed using the words 'AI' (Watson is at the relatively complex and useful end of the spectrum) so your suggestion that this project's use of 'AI' as a marketing term implies anything about whether they have an adequate dataset to validate it on is frankly hilarious. In this case, there's excellent reason to be sceptical about whether the service has a remotely adequate dataset, because even if lie detection were a simple problem, how on earth are you going to get calibration data involving hundreds of data points of real airline passengers lying about having weapons in their luggage or intending to overstay their visa? Never mind calibration data by gender, ethnicity and nationality...
sschueller 8y ago
Because movies show them as working and the general public is uniformed. Same goes for forensic tools that are actually possible compared to what TV shows like CSI show. Iraq and other countries purchases millions of dollars worth of phony bomb detectors. Something anyone with a bit of science education can debunk. Look at all the things on Kickstarter that are obvious pipedreams or scams yet people invest.
- dsego 8y ago
  Reminds of local towns buying expensive “smart benches” that really no one uses. Easy way to spend some tax-payer money and give the appearance of investing into sophisticated technology, when it's all cheap off the shelf components from China.
- biglenny 8y ago
  >Iraq and other countries purchases millions of dollars worth of phony bomb detectors. Something anyone with a bit of science education can debunk. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/fake-bomb-detectors-iraq https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/fake-bomb-detectors-... This is a hilarious read.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    This is not hilarious, it's appaling. The person selling this and people buying this are intentionally putting a lot of other people's lives at risk. I fully believe all involved parties should be tried for something at the level of attempted homicide.
Krasnol 8y ago
They make a good headline. In this case the Goverments of those countries love headlines that are related to their borders. AI guarding your border sells.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
Five years of reading HN and I’ve seen comments from all sorts of people. Former inmates, drug addicts, surgeons, lawyers, mechanics, welders, astrophysicist, particle physicists, pilots. Need I go on? Not once have I read anyone here who’s admitted to being a high level politician.
- hartator 8y ago
  Never thought about it but you’re right.
- ngcazz 8y ago
  Forgive me for being thick, but is your point that we'd need to have a politician's insight to understand the decision?
  - roenxi 8y ago
    To paraphrase, the question was "why is this legal when we all know it won't work?" and the answer was "we aren't the people who write the laws".
    - ngcazz 8y ago
      Makes sense! Thanks.
    - sbhn 8y ago
      Its legal when a whole bunch of suits standing behind the politician who uses there media priveledge to amplify an issue, are able to syphon without scrutiny, as many tax paying dollars as possible.
      - stochastic_monk 8y ago
        It’s not so much about the fact that taxes are levied as that there is a lack of accountability for how it’s used.
131012 8y ago
Hey, the first iteration "was only tested on 30 people". It must work for sure. (Seriously, wtf, 30 people?!?)
- mannykannot 8y ago
  I hope the test set included politicians - you need to have some subjects who are verifiably liars.
unethical_ban 8y ago
Even if they did work, it would be awful. Our society was built on large amounts of discretion being exercised by law enforcement and the ability to convincingly lie to law enforcement. Society is going to get flipped on its head if we are able to detect total truth, and enforce all laws with 100% effectiveness. Even worse when these tools will be mostly in the hands of the government, and not the people.
- del82 8y ago
  > Our society was built on large amounts of discretion being exercised by law enforcement This I get. > and the ability to convincingly lie to law enforcement. This less so. Can you elaborate?
  - unethical_ban 8y ago
    Sometimes, law enforcement can only be lenient (the first part of my original post can only hold) if it's "on the record" that you say something excusable. The LEO might know it's probably a lie, but either they understand a circumstance doesn't merit citation, or they know it's a crappy law. If everything were some day 100% honest, the polite niceties of "oh sorry didn't see the speed limit change" or "Forgot I left my pocket knife in carryon, sorry" would go away. Of course these are only two of countless examples.
    - thfuran 8y ago
      Eliminating the shit laws is a much better solution than ignoring them or working around them with lies.
      - perl4ever 8y ago
        It seems to me that the concept is basically analogous to the idea people have that we should eliminate the human element from contract enforcement. Or suppose we tried to eliminate all tolerances and slippage in engineering. It's utopian/dystopian and even seriously attempting it would be disastrous, in my opinion. I don't see why people need to touch the hot stove to understand that.
guy98238710 8y ago
I have seen my algorithm outperform me by a large margin at something I am an expert in. The task was a highly ambiguous visual analysis. The trick is that humans focus too much on strong signals. Algorithms are much better at correctly aggregating lots of weak signals.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Did the evaluation of algorithm's superior performance included both false positives and false negatives? Personally, I don't like the concept of deploying algorithms for which we don't understand how they work, in scenarios of high health or social impact. It's cute to deploy DNNs to classify cat pictures, as when - not if - it spectacularly fails, nothing of value is lost. But if you can't point at the verified model the algorithm follows, or at least trace the algorithm after the fact, understanding and assessing every step it took, then that algorithm has no place in making decisions about people's lives.
brobdingnagians 8y ago
Another thing that occurs to me, especially given recent publicity, is how this affects privacy. There are some/many things that are private and which you do not want the government or corporations to know. It is outside criminal actions and therefore none of their business, but if lie detectors become omnipresent, then it will become more and more tempting to use them everywhere to make things "more efficient" and to start everyone and their dog to asking more and more things that are none of their business.
samirm 8y ago
Repeated lie detector tests do work for most people. It's silly to think that your average joe is trained to control his/her biological responses to that extent. 1 lie detector test never works, a lot of them do.
lucb1e 8y ago
I can see the point of trials: as the article says, people told to lie will act very differently from people who want to lie, and a bunch of real-world data versus some lab data is surely going to improve it. I am not convinced that there is nothing about a person that gives away, at least in a good number of cases, whether someone is lying. I'm just wondering if it's too much to hope that they'll base the decision whether to implement it beyond the trial on data and not on marketing. And there is of course the argument that it should be possible, albeit with a lot of effort and/or a reasonable punishment, to break the law. (If this was impossible, we'd never get out of regimes we don't agree with, and with the advance of technology I'm afraid we're heading somewhere where a small group is actually able to oppress a huge number of people.)
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Though they are not perfectly accurate, they are generally indicative, so it's useful in a statistical game. Border agents are trained to look for all sorts of things, none of which make you guilty, but a few of which may make you suitable for more questions or a quick search. So I'd imagine it'll get used in the same context.

Canada 8y ago

Just like the evil TSA imaging systems, best thing to do is refuse to participate.

kranner 8y ago
I imagine it will not be optional when it is out of the experimental phase.
- rasteau 8y ago
  The electronic strip search machines are still optional; they'll (eventually) give you a pat down instead.
- Canada 8y ago
  What can they do? Strap you in front of it like it’s clockwork orange? You can refuse to respond to it. Cover your face with your hand and say “operator operator operator” or some other nonsense. Say it’s creepy or ridiculous to talk to such a thing. They will let you go.
  - kranner 8y ago
    If it's mandatory if you want to enter the EU (as a non-citizen), I'd guess they would deny you entry.
    - travelbuffoon 8y ago
      Nope. It's for customs, not immigration. You're already in the country, they just need to figure out whether they need to search your bags for contraband.
      - stale2002 8y ago
        So then if you refuse to answer they will just search your bags.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

I always feel a bit sorry for the rubber stamp monkeys sitting at the border control in the US. They are so fucked at so many levels that isn't funny any more. For starters, their job is purely symbolic as it is unlikely anyone that shouldn't be there would get that far: it would imply multiple levels of failure in several agencies: you traveled internationally and were profiled, checked, and triple checked before you even arrived at your gate. They are bureaucratic ass coverage with little practical real life value. What little value there is has more to do with controlling migration than any security. Domestically, many airlines already have automated checkins (including luggage dropoff in some places), automated boarding, and in some places automated passport checks at immigration. The last human hurdle is security screening, which is mostly theater at this point. So, automated screening of travelers at the beginning of their journey makes a lot of sense. Mostly it's just confirming the obvious: are they who they claim they are (i.e. does the person showing up match the automated profile available already, are there any red flags warranting extra attention) and are they carrying anything they should not be carrying. Like AI already outperforming physicians in the job of scanning medical images for anomalies, surely state of the art luggage scanners are also outperforming humans (probably by magnitudes). Add to that some screening for clear markers that somebody's behavior is a bit off and you have basically automated away security staff likely to miss those signals because they are human beings that get tired, stressed, bored, distracted, biased, etc. So the combined checks of identity, profiling, automated luggage scans and escalation to humans in case of any doubt should be vastly more efficient. The default case should be zero humans involved with the whole process. When it escalates, you still get the humans in the loop that are then a lot more effective because they already know there were some red flags. This stuff will initially perform quite poorly probably. But it will still be worth it in identifying the "definitely not lying, don't waste your time on this" category of travelers.

dr_teh 8y ago
" But it will still be worth it in identifying the "definitely not lying, don't waste your time on this" category of travelers." That is absolutely not how any of this works, at all.

travelbuffoon 8y ago

Significant note: this appears to be a customs screening, not immigration screening. Which makes perfect sense since it's extremely hard for customs agents to actually catch smugglers. (Compared to immigration screening which is largely based on hard criteria which human agents evaluate with much less leeway.) The bigger question is whether it's effective - but anything is likely to be more effective than customs agents selecting people to search based on gut feeling.

illiac_1962 8y ago
The Israelis claim profiling is very effective.

qwerty456127 8y ago

This is outrageous. I always feel extremely anxious (and in such a case I would also feel angry) and try to imitate I'm not by playing Mr. Spock + smile when passing border (or any other) checks although I'm neither a smuggler nor a terrorist (but have some impostor syndrome). Such a device will probably notice this and put me in problems.

kilroy123 8y ago
I agree. It is a high anxiety-producing situation, even though I'm doing nothing wrong. I travel yearly to other countries and I still get very stressed.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  I would imagine crosssing a border is the only interaction most people ever have with law enforcement.
  - dagw 8y ago
    Or at least the only adversarial interaction.
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      I don't think I've ever spoken to an on-duty police officer in my life.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      Crossing the border isn't adversarial. A speeding ticket isn't adversarial (usually, unless you make it that way). They're just routine transactions. A "driving while X", a terry stop or other fishing expedition type stop is adversarial. Occasionally we have comment threads on HN that remind me how far removed a lot people here are from these issues and it does not make me confident that there will be improvement in my lifetime. This comment thread is one of them. I don't support this AI thing at all but as far as problems with law enforcement go border agent's demeanor should be really far down the priority list. I'm all for things that put the issue on people's radar and I don't wanna come off as saying "but X is worse so we shouldn't care about Y" but this seems like a first world problem.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

naijabb 8y ago

We need the US embassies to use this. I have been denied visas three times because the interviewers feel I would not return to my home country. If this AI detector was used, at least they would know I am honest about just visiting the USA.

dagw 8y ago
AI can never be better than the training data you feed it. If videos of your interviews where used to train on how a 'liar' might behave, it will make the same mistakes as the human interviewers.
- isostatic 8y ago
  E.g. amazon resume sifting ai https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...

atupis 8y ago

"iBorderCtrl team, said that they are “quite confident” they can bring the accuracy rate up to 85 percent." Magical 85 percent accuracy. so it is basically toy.

captainbland 8y ago
So what like one in six or seven people will be incorrectly flagged as lying? That's just silly, it'd be a total circus trying to use it.
- FabHK 8y ago
  Well, in particular, suppose 1 out of 100 people is lying at the border. Send 10k people over the border, 100 are lying, 9900 aren't. With 85% accuracy, 85 of liars are flagged as lying (correctly), and 15% x 9900 = 1485 of non-liars are flagged as lying (incorrectly). Thus, a bit more than 5% of people flagged as lying are actually lying, while nearly 95% of people flagged are innocent. This is not even taking into account the possibility that hardened criminals might be less nervous than somewhat anxious normal people. Enjoy your border crossings, everyone. EDIT: fix italics EDIT to add: And that's after they get the accuracy up to 85%. And unless accuracy is defined somewhat differently.
  - cporios 8y ago
    > With 85% accuracy, 85 of liars are flagged as lying (correctly), [...] This is not what accuracy means. 85% accuracy just means that 85% of all the decisions the system makes are correct. A system in such a setting, where a single false negative matters a lot more than a single false positive (which would simply be handed over to a human for further investigation) would necessarily be tuned for extremely high recall at the cost of precision. In other words, it would often flag innocent people for further investigation (as you've said), but it would almost never clear people that should've been flagged.
    - FabHK 8y ago
      Ah, yes, you're right. Thanks for correcting my misunderstanding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision#In_binary_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision#In_bina...

code4tee 8y ago

Doesn’t GDPR have a lot to say about the use of algorithms for decision making? This sort of thing of letting an ‘AI’ decide on its own what kind of airport experience you’re going to have seems to fly into the face of that.

lotu 8y ago
I don't think GDPR would prevent this I read though it for work before it was implemented I don't recall anything saying algorithms can't make decisions about people. Our company uses algorithms to decide what ad is displayed to people, and I'm not recalling anything that would make these diffrent under the law. Furthermore, I believe the government has been given broad exceptions from GDPR for anything related to doing government stuff. This is form of legitimate interest "processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller;" It is in the public interest the border control laws be enforced and a manner that is both effective and minimized cost to the public, also this involves the exercise of official border control authority, therefore this is acceptable. (Standard reminder that if you are relying on the advice of a stranger for legal issues that matter you should get an attorney.)
- mattlondon 8y ago
  I found this: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/rights-related-to-automated-decision-making-including-profiling/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-da... It is interesting that there is a comment about explicit consent - I imagine this will be like the millimeter wave scanners: you can either go in and get your genitals imaged by some remote voyeur, or if you dont like that then you can get a thorough strip search by someone in blue gloves. Have a nice day :-)

presscast 8y ago

I wonder what its cost function is. I sure hope it's better than "get people to say inconsistent things", as I'd expect that to produce a system that is optimized to trip people up.

albertgoeswoof 8y ago

Couldn’t we just use a random number generator instead?

iguy 8y ago
Some places do exactly this. I think the idea was that, with any kind of profiling, it would be easy for drug gangs to figure out who to use as mules. And with any judgement, they can pressurise the guy making the call. But a lottery machine everyone can see is harder to defeat.

varjag 8y ago

Anyone who ever dealt with a chat bot in customer support should be alarmed by this.

qwerty456127 8y ago

In general respect to human rights and privacy has always seemed an important part of the EU ideology. I just hope this a purely local initiative and the central EU government is going to intervene and stop this.

coldcode 8y ago

If we could make politicians have to pass an AI lie detector we build first, then I am for this. Firstly this will never happen, and secondly if for some reason it did we would then likely have no politicians.

Symmetry 8y ago
That might inadvertently select for politicians who believe what the voters want to hear over those who lie but know its a lie. Since the later want to get re-elected they'll quietly abandon the good-sounding-but-horrible plans they talked about to get into office but the former will actually try to carry them out.

tinus_hn 8y ago

Border checkpoints in the Schengen zone, which is most of the EU, are forbidden.

logifail 8y ago
Reality check: tell that to the German border police who are standing on the A93 motorway at Kiefersfelden eyeballing every single driver entering Germany from Austria. There's more than a whiff of Checkpoint Charlie about the place (portakabins installed directly on what was the motorway surface, concrete traffic calming measures, 5 km/h speed limit, armed police, more police sitting in chase car should anyone decide not to stop, floodlit at night) I'm sure it's worth it, what with Austria and Germany sharing a fairly long land border which is more or less completely unsecured. Side roads - of which there are plenty - don't get checked much either. <rolls eyes>

antpls 8y ago

"which cost the EU a little more than $5 million" Well, I didn't know my taxes were used to build such systems. It would have been really more acceptable if they sold the system as a simple chat bot that records what you says, in case you are involved in a case later. But the "lie detector" part is scary and this is the typical instance that Elon Musk warned against. I don't understand how academics accepted to work on that.

apo 8y ago

"Lie detection" is probably just the beginning. Think of what could be done by combining this system with facial recognition. Deployed widely enough, this system could build a personalized profile for each individual, mapping emotional state to times and locations, or more crudely it could be used for racial profiling.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

StavrosK 8y ago

What the hell? This is completely unacceptable, who voted this in? I'm not so much concerned about this system, which is a complete joke and is never going to work, as much as I am concerned by the fact that some people thought this was acceptable enough to actually deploy.

isostatic 8y ago
Looks like the commission is running this as a pilot. As always your contact will be via your MEP, who appoints the commission president (based on the fact the EPP was the largest party in 2014 and Junker was the presidential candidate of that party)
- antpls 8y ago
  And also, don't forget to register yourself on the voter lists for the EU's 2019 election! The countries in which the pilot takes place were mainly EPP (odd correlation...?) By the way, direct links to newpress release and project page, which lists involved countries : - http://ec.europa.eu/research/infocentre/article_en.cfm?artid=49726 http://ec.europa.eu/research/infocentre/article_en.cfm?artid... - https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/202703_en.html https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/202703_en.html

modzu 8y ago

OBEY

modzu 8y ago
lets spell it out then https://obeygiant.com/propaganda/manifesto/ https://obeygiant.com/propaganda/manifesto/

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

Not to put a fine point on it, but "the team at iBorderCtrl" are charlatans. Their system is supposed to detect lying from facial expressions. The only kind of "science" purporting to back this possibility is the work of the psychologist, Paul Ekman, which is based on flimsy evidence at best. A gigantic hint that this "research" is a bunch of hooey is his claim to have identified 29 "wizzards of deception detection" [1]- in very, very literal terms those are people with the magickal power to tell when someone is lying just by looking at their face (and magickally perceiving revealing facial expressions, subconsciously). The iBorderCtrl system might indeed be replaced by a wizzard, or, why not be more inclusive, a witch, with a magick wand pointed to the traveller, while questions are being asked of them. If the traveller is telling the truth, the wand will jump up, if they're lying it will dive down. The witch is not moving the wand! She's only channeling the MAGICK! The same magick being channelled by this revolting misuse of technology for the most odious purpose imaginable. It is not a coincidence that this "prototype" is being deployed in Hungary, the country in the EU that has embraced populist, xenophobic tendencies as no other, having elected a master of the craft, Viktor Orbán, as a prime minister and head of government. This is such utter, utter bullshit. I cannot believe that the Commission agreed to all this. What the fucking fuck. ___________ [1] http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/on_lie_detection_wizards..pdf http://www.communicationcache.com/uploads/1/0/8/8/10887248/o...

mschuster91 8y ago
> I cannot believe that the Commission agreed to all this. I can. I mean, the driving forces in the EU got extremely xenophobic. Italy is ruled by the fascist Salvini, the PiS in Poland are not far behind Orban, the UK government has been xenophobic for decades, France suffers from xenophobia too (after the terror attacks, though) and our own Horst Seehofer risked collapsing the German government over (literally) 0 migrants (per https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/seehofers-deal-zahlen-der-bundesregierung-zeigen-wie-nutzlos-das-fluechtlings-abkommen-mit-spanien-ist_id_9399400.html https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/seehofers-deal-zahl...)... What are human rights, what is democracy worth, when there is no one left to enforce them? The EU won't do shit against Hungary, Poland or Italy (as there is a 100% consensus required!), the US under Trump are going isolationist and trampling on human rights wherever they can, and the UN Security Council is powerless against the stuff that Russia, China, Saudi-Arabia etc. do because there's always a veto power that bails out their "friends".

contravariant 8y ago

>The virtual agent is reportedly customized according to the traveler’s gender, ethnicity, and language. That all just seems to be fancy way of saying it's discriminatory and racist.

lucb1e 8y ago
In that case a system programmed not to recommend vaginal checkups to men is sexist? I can totally imagine that different genders lie differently, and if it turns out that they don't (or that different ethnicities don't or whatever), great, one model fewer to maintain right?

leephillips 8y ago

As if getting through an airport isn't bad enough, now in these locations we will have to submit to a pseudoscientific farce. (Polygraphs, that record more detailed physiological data, in concert with a human interpreter, fail to "detect deceit". Clearly this system, which the article says was tested on 30 people before deployment, will produce random results.)

misiti3780 8y ago

7 years ago, I worked on a government contract (not S,TS) trying to build a lie detector using computer vision and the research done by Paul Ekman (from the book Blink). After a few years of building models, we determined that it would be impossible to build an effective detector. I wonder if the research has changed.

sebazzz 8y ago
Perhaps they use machine learning for this. Was that used in your project?
- misiti3780 8y ago
  yes we used a combination PCA for feature extraction and then SVMs and logistic regression for classification.
  - dr_zoidberg 8y ago
    Translation for those unfamiliar: they used machine learning. And while SVM is not "advanced enough" compared to "deep learning"[0], it's a very powerfull classificator/estimator on its own. To OP: maybe today with a huge GPU, lots of data and more complex models you could get something going. Do you think a more advanced model could really pull this through? Maybe using other features -- perhaps coupling with a thermal camera can help detect changes in temperature that could signal the person is lying. [0] quotes because I've heard this complaint a few times already, and it's usually from people that have bought the buzzword but usually don't understand much about machine learning in general.
    - misiti3780 8y ago
      I havn’t been following this story really closely today, but here is my two sense (albeit outdated): In the research I was working on, there were two types of deception/lies: high stakes (aka suicide bomber or shoe bomber) and low states (you have a pound of cocaine strapped to your leg). If you want to build a lie detector on facial data, you need consider things like 1. It is important to have a robust data set that contains lots of example of both for training and cross-validation 2. False positives can be very expensive (because you start pulling people aside, lines build up, people get pissed, etc) The project I worked on was trying to solve a specific problem: replace Behavior detection officers [1]: These are people that sit inconspicuously at the TSA checkpoints and decide who gets to get pulled aside for further screening and who goes through (I do know anything else about what they do and where they are, numbers etc.) Their training is advanced, laborious, and expensive for TSA. They are, of course, trying to catch terrorists (aka the high stakes lies) but in reality they are dealing with the low stakes lies. The only terrorist I can think of since 9/11 that got close to taking down a plane was Richard Reid, and they missed him so they seem to be 0/1 in high states lies). Anyways, the problem with building their replacement is we do not have a lot of good examples of high stakes lies in video data. There are some (Scott Peterson, etc) but not enough. Also, the models they were built off of were "micro-expression" [2] detectors, and micro-expressions show up differently across cultures (maybe the consensus has changed since I was modeling this stuff) . So, in short, the project I was on failed because the data sucked and even if we did build a model, it was overfit to the data we trained it on. I am not sure how deep learning and more advanced GPUs would solve that. Maybe they found better data, but I would be skeptical. I honestly would be surprised if they actually did much better than random (ROC > .5) Sorry for the rambling - end of the day for me on the east coast. [1] https://www.tsa.gov/news/testimony/2013/11/14/tsa-behavior-detection-and-analysis-program https://www.tsa.gov/news/testimony/2013/11/14/tsa-behavior-d... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microexpression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microexpression

badosu 8y ago

Seems like the perfect strawman for recording face recognition data use in surveillance...

llalie92 8y ago

There's a lot of skepticism in this thread. I've actually researched this a bit and there is research suggesting AI-based lie detection to be possible. It will need a multimodal approach where it's more than just video images though. Also, the use case of border control is a great application. There's a lot of misunderstanding in this thread. The AI screening is just a first screening, and if someone fails that, then they go to a human. So moderate false positive rates are acceptable. The commentators on this thread generally make a few mistakes: assuming lie detectors won't work because polygraphs don't work, assuming the border control use case needs to be perfect or not have false positives (it doesn't), assuming Paul Ekman's microexpressions are all that iBorderCtrl is basing their research on (I agree Ekman's research is questionable, and I don't know what exactly iBorderCtrl is doing, but it seems highly likely they're doing more than just looking for microexpressions), assuming racist intent or that it'll just flag non-Europeans as liars.

driverdan 8y ago
> there is research suggesting AI-based lie detection to be possible [citation needed]
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
Yes, of course there is skepticism in the thread. The claim being made is completely ridiculous. I would be very surprised if the "research suggesting AI-based lie detection to be possible" that you mention is from anyone who has any sort of reputation to protect. Machine learning scientists, the vast majority of, would not touch such obvious pseudo-scientific claptrap with a ten-foot pole. It's the kind of thing that tarnishes one's reputation and never washes off. And rightly so. I would not welcome, but grudingly accept, your references to the contrary. Also, if iBorderCtrl are not using Eckman's work, then what kind of theoretical framework are they basing their work on? Why is it "highlly likely they're doing more than just looking for microexpressions"? Where is all the science of detecting lies from looking at peoples' faces? And if they're not basing their work on someone's research, then what are they basing it on?
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

schoollunch 8y ago

notice it says "asses their report"