CONTEXT: We aim to bring you all the news surrounding Real World Research and sometimes our team of electronic gnomes turn up a story like this – hence the Schrödinger’s Donkey classification (e-mail us and we’ll explain). If you are still reading on, you may think that any article that quoted the Pirate Party of Germany must be fake news, well, no. They exist – all one MEP of them. Interesting to see European politicians backing any kind of lie detector – that’s kind of like Turkey’s voting for Christmas, isn’t it?
IMPACT: Low (or High if you are a Pirate)
READ TIME: 2 mins
Quality Level Mean [1 – 10]: 7
1. “And is hoping to set a principle that publicly funded research must comply with EU fundamental rights — and help avoid public money being wasted on AI “snake oil” in the process.”
2. “Yet this AI-fuelled commercial RD “experiment” to build a video lie detector — which entailed testers being asked to respond to questions put to them by a virtual border guard as a webcam scanned their facial expressions and the system sought to detect what an official EC summary of the project describes as “biomarkers of deceit” in an effort to score the truthfulness of their facial expressions (yes, really🤦♀️) — scored over €4.5 million/$5.4 million in EU research funding under the bloc’s Horizon 2020 scheme.”
3. “In the 21st century it’s frankly incredible that millions of euros of public money are being funnelled into rehashing terrible old ideas — before you even consider the ethical and legal blindspots inherent in the EU funding research that runs counter to fundamental rights set out in the EU’s charter.”
4. “No external ethics oversight. Not only does it look hypocritical for the EU to be funding rights-hostile research but — critics contend — it’s a waste of public money that could be spent on genuinely useful research (be it for a security purpose or, more broadly, for the public good; and for furthering those “European values” EU lawmakers love to refer to).”
5. ““All research and innovation activities carried out under Horizon 2020 must comply with ethical principles and relevant national, EU and international law, including the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights”, it also told us, adding: “All proposals undergo a specific ethics evaluation which verifies and contractually obliges the compliance of the research project with ethical rules and standards”.”
Source URL: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/05/orwellian-ai-lie-detector-project-challenged-in-eu-court/