HP face recognition doesn't do negroes

[davidnix71]

HP computers are racist

This is hysterical. A black man bought one for Christmas and the camera won't follow his face. It has no trouble with his white coworker Wanda.

[Aloone_Jonez]

That's shows how incompetent designers are: it's obvious they've not bothered to test it properly.

I've heard about the use of face recognition for CCTV, I wonder if they use the same software? Great, if you're black there's less chance you'll be caught shoplifting on camera, it's a shame that I'm white so I'll have to black up. ;D

[Lead Head]

Just a small "whoops" on the HP programming department.

[reactosguy]

And the fucking racists should freaking fix their frigging face recognition system.

You can compare that to slavery; only whites were allowed to do it.

[Calum]

it's pretty racist of HP, regardless of whether it was deliberate or not (ie: it's racist of them not to consider this as a possible problem before dispatching the software)

[Aloone_Jonez]

HP aren't racist.

The software just needs the face to have enough illumination. Obviously someone with darker the skin will reflect less light and will need better illumination.

http://consumerist.com/2009/12/consumer-reports-tests-racist-hp-webcam.html

[Calum]

so black people are actually being racist by having darker faces than whites?

right on.

No, actually i stand by my statement that HP's product is racist*. If they had tested this with a range of different people, not just whites, then they could have uncovered this embarrasing issue before releasing the product.

Just because they're not trying to be racist specifically, doesn't mean the damage hasn't been done.


by the way,

The solution: the webcam needs foreground light to function, and the more pigment in your skin, the closer you seem to have to sit.

that's not a solution, that's just a description of the stupid fact that black people are going to have a much harder time getting this to work than white people, which is actually racist.

[Aloone_Jonez]

How do you know that they haven't tested it with black people?

It could be the lighting conditions that they've neglected.

[worker201]

If they're not testing in different lighting conditions, then their failure is complete.  A computer that only works under certain lighting conditions is a boat anchor, not a business machine.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I agree.

I'm not defending their shoddy product development, just that the accusation that they're racist is unfounded.

[Refalm]

In the HP Photosmart project, the developers cut the quality (quality and effectiveness) of the product to reduce cost (efficiency). This resulted in equal or more time (logistics).

We can safely assume that the final milestone was not met according to the pre-determined planning, and thus Quality Assurance had to suffer.

Is HP racist? Probably not.

[Calum]

I agree.

I'm not defending their shoddy product development, just that the accusation that they're racist is unfounded.

it is not unfounded.

the damage is done, ie: they are selling a product that is functionally much more useless for black people.

Whether they meant to or not, the result is racist against black people who want to use this product.

How about black slavery, do you think that was racist? Most people nowadays agree that it was. On the other hand, i bet nobody even thought about things like racism, in the days when slavery was legal in the US (and sanctioned by the UK). Just because they didn't think about it, doesn't mean there's no blame to be handed out.

[worker201]

As a sort of follow-up, Sony Cybershot webcams have the same problem as the HP cameras.  And Nikon Coolpix cameras now have facial recognition software that registers a warning when someone blinks during the photo shoot.  Not surprisingly, it doesn't think too highly of Asian eyes.  Which is funny, because Nikon is a Japanese company.

But this article goes a step further and claims that many of these companies are not writing their own software algorithms, they're buying them from other companies.  It's possible that the facial recognition program used in all 3 of these products was written by the same team (although not probable).  All in all, it means that some jackass rushed their product to market, and the big players didn't do much in-house testing, probably to save money.  Does this mean Sony, HP, and Nikon are blameless?  Not even close.  If they were doing their due dilligence, they'd save a lot of embarrassment down the road.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100122/wl_time/08599195464300

[Aloone_Jonez]

This has made it more obvious to me how dumb computers really are, most animals are much more intelligent than a computer program; my cat can recognise human different faces even though it's something its brain was never designed/programmed to do.

I wonder what the current level of AI is compared to an animal?

Have computers reached, grasshopper-level intelligence yet?

I'm a sceptical that AI will reach human level: even creating a program as smart as a rat is a long way off. Maybe there's some law of physics preventing humans from creating a machine as intelligent as themselves; perhaps such a machine would have to be built by an animal which is much more more intelligent than us.

[piratePenguin]

This has made it more obvious to me how dumb computers really are, most animals are much more intelligent than a computer program; my cat can recognise human different faces even though it's something its brain was never designed/programmed to do.

I wonder what the current level of AI is compared to an animal?

Have computers reached, grasshopper-level intelligence yet?

I'm a sceptical that AI will reach human level: even creating a program as smart as a rat is a long way off. Maybe there's some law of physics preventing humans from creating a machine as intelligent as themselves; perhaps such a machine would have to be built by an animal which is much more more intelligent than us.

Can your cat scan through billions of web pages and find occurrences of search terms?

Different tools for different jobs. For now, though, HP should've used cats.  8)

There are two identical twins I know in college, well I see them (normally one of them) around every week or so often. Never call them by their names. Even if I recognize the difference in their faces, I get mixed up with names anyhow and can't associate them with the correct name reliably. So usually if we're going out I ask someone "is mick/kev in the white shirt?" or figure it out like that. Not good at learning small differences in things, and very bad with names. But if I was a cat and I didn't need names I'd probably know mic/kev since I wouldn't associate their differences with a name and then get mixed up so I can't recall it confidently.