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A controversial company using DNA to sketch the faces of criminals
- supernova87a 6y agoTo what extent do genes encode the facial features that make them distinctly recognizable to us? Is there a way to say it as a "%"? I can certainly see how your basic head size/shape and position of nose/mouth/eyes, etc is baked in there somehow. But I'd love to know, the fundamentals of why you look like your parents, what is that? Certain (75%?) placement of facial features locked in by genes, so of course you look like them, but then the last 25% up to developmental noise? (Example -- fingerprints, almost completely determined by developmental noise, right?)
- BurningFrog 6y agoUnless you have some deforming disease, accident or malnutrition, identical twins have very close to identical faces. Identical twins have very similar, but distinguishable fingerprints.
- ashtonkem 6y agoIdentical twins having extremely similar faces isn’t exactly a great argument for determining facial characteristics via dna, as identical twins also shared the same environment during fetal growth. It’s entirely possible that genetics and developmental experience combined creates facial structure, and that dna alone is insufficient.
- iguy 6y agoI guess you should compare to non-identical twins. Who I think look like siblings who happen to be the same age. But no doubt someone somewhere has tried to quantify this.
- BurningFrog 6y agoFair point. The only experimental way I can think of checking this is how similar cloned animals are. A quick googling seems to say clones are quite similar, but not really identical. Which I think somewhat contradicts my claim.
- jedimastert 6y agoI think "deforming accident" is a lot easier than some might realize. I personally have had an injury that probably changed the shape of my face, and it wasn't super note-worthy. Especially if someone gets something like a broken jaw, you can look almost unrecognizable.
- maceurt 6y agoDepending on how you breathe, your posture, how you sit, if you exercised consistently as a child, etc. your face can look completely different. The greatest example of this is how early humans had significantly larger jaws due to their diet and exercise, while humans today who have almost the exact same facial genes have much smaller jaws.
- nyokodo 6y agoThe introduction of the fork in the middle ages caused the development of the overbite. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/how-forks-gave-us-overbites-and-pots-saved-the-toothless/267252/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/how-forks...
- est31 6y agoAlso: sanitation gave us polio: https://nextnature.net/2014/01/how-modern-sanitation-gave-us-polio https://nextnature.net/2014/01/how-modern-sanitation-gave-us...
- est31 6y agoDo you have more reading on that? Especially on the breathing and posture/sitting part.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoWould identical twins suggest the genes encode facial features to a high degree?
- ashtonkem 6y agoNo, as identical twins also share whatever happened in utero. To draw a strong example, take fetal alcohol syndrome, which often causes facial changes. Two identical twins with FAS will share similar facial changes, but these changes will not actually be encoded in their dna, but instead will be the result of developmental history.
- kyberias 6y agoYou keep repeating that DNA doesn't have a strong role in determining what a person looks like. Yet everything we know about development including twin-studies seems to suggest that in fact it has strong role. For example, this scientific article published in Nature opens with this: "The human face is a complex trait under strong genetic control, as evidenced by the striking visual similarity between twins." https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45885 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45885 These researchers who are _specialists_ on this field have no doubt. Why do you keep casting doubt on this?
- liability 6y agoIdentical twins, sharing the same DNA, look rather identical but not truly identical. Even when raised apart. I am skeptical of reconstructing faces from DNA using current knowledge and technology though. It seems theoretically feasible, but I wouldn't bet on this company being able to do it well.
- ponker 6y agoDevelopmental noise will be dominated by fetal development, not life after birth.
- ashtonkem 6y agoWhich probably isn’t directly encoded into your dna, but rather epigenetic markers which may or may not be easily collected and quantified.
- liability 6y agoMaybe so, but fathers can look a great deal like sons and they only share something like half their code and don't share a womb at all. Identical twins share their code and look even more alike. I think later life matters like obesity probably make a bigger difference. Being fat or gaunt can dramatically change somebody's appearance. Grooming habits as well. Spies deliberately adopting disguises can make themselves look quite different by modifying these sort of things.
- asdff 6y agoNot necessarily. Fitness, sun, sleep, alcohol, drugs, diet, smoking, and stress are some examples of environmental factors that can influence your appearance including your face after birth.
- bpodgursky 6y agoIf you were looking for a suspect and the only identification you had was a photo of their identical twin, would you use it? Obviously it's not a perfect match, but it's going to be wildly better than a sketch artist's attempt at a usable drawing.
- ponker 6y agoProbably pretty predictive. Identical twins have different (but correlated) developmental noise and look anything from very similar to totally identical.
- tokai 6y agoClones from the Dolly sheep were not identical. If I remember correctly it is thought that epigenetics played a role in their differences.
- Real_S 6y agoYes, it depends on the facial feature, but some parts are fairly highly heritable. https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45885 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep45885
- blintz 6y agoThis is the slippery slope that privacy advocates have sometimes been characterized as 'paranoid' for pointing out - "The database is just for ____ crimes!": national security, terrorism, heinous sexual assaults, child exploitation etc. But there is almost no world in which we do not slowly and methodically expand the scope of 'bad enough' crimes that the data gets used for. In this case, it slid from sexual assault to just plain assault, but there is rarely a line like this that gets kept firm.
- zvrba 6y agoBut this is different: you find some DNA on a crime scene, don't find it in a database, then use the algorithm to sketch a face. Granted, they had to use some database to build their algorithm. Also: I looked at the examples linked to in another comment, and I don't think the algorithm is very good.
- RandoHolmes 6y agoOf course it's not good, it's magic disguised as science. It's theoretically possible, but we're nowhere near the level of tech to be able to pull it off. It's basically a money grab.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoWhile that's quite likely true, I wonder if you have any solid reason to say this, or any background in the subject of the genetics of faces.
- RandoHolmes 6y agothat's the wrong attitude. That would be like a layman hearing someone say "general AI isn't possible, their claims are bollocks" and someone responding with "maybe that's true, but do you have a background in general AI?". And this attitude causes things like police to arrest the wrong person because they don't understand the limits of machine learning. I don't need to be an expert to simply say this is problematic and shouldn't be used. YOU need an expert to explain why it CAN be used. We need more skepticism, not less. But to answer your question, I understand biology well enough to understand the challenges involved here. But you don't even need that to understand the problem. In their marketing photo's, they've attempted to replicate the _HAIRSTYLE_. That by itself is all you need to understand how low the applicability of this is. Just imagine a police officer arresting someone who was bald and sort of looked like the criminal because this algorithm chose to render them as bald. People aren't NEARLY good enough at being able to identify a _STRANGER_ with a radically different hairstyle to be trusted with this.
- dogma1138 6y agoExamples from the company website if anyone is interested: https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/examples https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/examples (TV/Media volunteers) https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/posters https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/posters (Actual cases from the looks of it) These seems to be for the most part on the same level as some good police sketches, what surprised me is that the few renders where they showed a tooth gap that matched the photo quite well, the seem also to be pretty good at predicting some facial features like the nose but overall fail quite poorly at eyebrows (i'm not sure if it's because of the neutral expression or the algo itself). Dystopian indeed but if these examples are actually representative I'm almost astounded by the resutls.
- andai 6y agoLooks like they can't predict the age though? Eg. first two examples are way off and say "Age: unknown". I thought we might be able to do it with the telomeres or something?
- est31 6y agoIIRC there are sequencing challenges for any section of DNA made up of repetitive sequences. Telomeres are made up of repetitive DNA. But there is probably some way to do it, there might be age-related "clocks" in the metagenomics as well.
- dogma1138 6y agoNot everyone is born with the same length of telomeres and not everyone ages at the same rate so it’s not a good predictor unless you have multiple samples over a sufficiently long enough period.
- throwaway122378 6y agoThat’s now. Like all technology give it time and it’ll be more real than a photograph.
- flying_kiwi 6y ago
- Real_S 6y agoRelated, and touched on only briefly in the article. DNA to face technology is also being sought after in other countries... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10617-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10617-y https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/business/china-dna-uighurs-xinjiang.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/business/china-dna-uighur...
- thdrdt 6y agoThis is an art project from 2013 doing the same thing: http://deweyhagborg.com/projects/stranger-visions http://deweyhagborg.com/projects/stranger-visions
- syncopate 6y agoI particularly like how it can predict hair styles. Not only how a barber would do dreads but also how they would color it and how they happened to brush their hair on a given day. Very impressive!
- clircle 6y agoWould be interesting to put a confidence "interval" on the predicted face. Perhaps show a range of faces that are consistent with the model. That might help to alleviate some concerns.
- appleflaxen 6y agoHow dd they get the DNA for the people they are showing?
- grumio 6y agoImagine when people who don't know any better start plugging this into facial-recognition cameras, and arrest based on the chaining of two flawed/imperfect algorithms. Not if, but when.