2022-07-26, 11:40–12:10, Battery 🔋
HowNormalAmI.eu is an interactive documentary that showcases how algorithms judge your beauty, age, gender, weight, life expectancy and emotions by simply looking at your face. The project not only shows how face recognition technology is entering our everyday lives, but it lets you experience these judgements yourself in a safe and privacy friendly way.
This talk will zoom in on one algorithm that tries to deduce your Body Mass Index (BMI). The 'making of' will discuss the ethical questions it raised, the dubious science behind it, the dodgy data sources, and the surprising companies that are playing around with this technology.
HowNormalAmI.eu is an interactive documentary that showcases how algorithms judge your beauty, age, gender, weight, life expectancy and emotions by simply looking at your face. The project not only shows how face recognition technology is entering our everyday lives, but it lets you experience these judgements yourself in a safe and privacy friendly way.
Dutch artist Tijmen Schep has created this interactive experience to reveal how we are increasingly being judged on our face. For example, dating websites like Tinder uses beauty scoring algorithms to match people who are about equally attractive. Services like HireVue claims to find the optimal job applicants based on their 'micro expressions'.
This talk will zoom in on one algorithm that tries to deduce your Body Mass Index (BMI) from your face. The 'making of' will discuss the ethical questions it raised, the dubious science behind it, the dodgy data sources, and the surprising companies that are playing around with this technology.
Since its launch in september of 2020 the project has been viewed over 185.000 times. If you want to find out if you're more attractive than the Spice girls, make sure you visit www.hownormalami.eu
Tijmen Schep is a technology critic, privacy designer and public speaker focussing ethical innovation. As a critic, his goal is to help a wider audience develop nuanced understanding of technological questions that face society. He coined the term “Social Cooling” to describe the data-driven chilling effects that can occur as we move from an information society to a “reputation economy”.
As a designer he helps develop privacy enhancing technologies. His book “Design my Privacy” is used by universities of applied design across the Netherlands and Germany. His work on Candle, a privacy friendly smart home prototype, won him a Dutch Privacy Award.
He currently works as an artist for the EU Sherpa project, which explores what issues around AI society should deal with by 2025.
Photo by Giorgos Gripeos, CC-BY