This company says it's developing a system that can recognize your face from just your DNA

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/01/31/1044576/corsight-face-recognition-from-dna/

A police officer is at the scene of a murder. No witnesses. No camera footage. No obvious suspects or motives. Just a bit of hair on the sleeve of the victim’s jacket. DNA from the cells of one strand is copied and compared against a database. No match comes back, and the case goes cold.

Corsight AI, a facial recognition subsidiary of the Israeli AI company Cortica, purports to be devising a solution for that sort of situation by using DNA to create a model of a face that can then be run through a facial recognition system. It is a task that experts in the field regard as scientifically untenable.

Corsight unveiled its “DNA to Face” product in a presentation by chief executive officer Robert Watts and executive vice president Ofer Ronen intended to court financiers at the Imperial Capital Investors Conference in New York City on December 15. It was part of the company’s overall product road map, which also included movement and voice recognition. The tool “constructs a physical profile by analyzing genetic material collected in a DNA sample,” according to a company slide deck viewed by surveillance research group IPVM and shared with MIT Technology Review.

Corsight declined a request to answer questions about the presentation and its product road map. “We are not engaging with the press at the moment as the details of what we are doing are company confidential,” Watts wrote in an email.

*snip*

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Fucking tech bros. Chasing money with science that doesn't exist.

[brush]

2. Yep, Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos all over again.

[sky_masterson]

3. It should be easy enough to prove

how close it is to accurate through it's results compared to known test samples. I find this stuff fascinating. Genealogy has been a hobby of mine for many years. And the fact they can catch killers through their family trees now is incredible.
I've used the same techniques they use in forensic genealogy to find unknown parents of a few friends. Its a ton of work, but exciting when you make connections.

[getagrip_already]

4. Interesting, but I wouldn't dismiss it just yet.....

Maybe not something we will see this decade, but with enough data, they may be able to piece together a face.

For example, someone with a specific genetic marker or markers may have an 83% probability of a specific nose shape. Same for distance between the eyes. Same for the type of lips. They may be able to eventually get a rough estimate of age from specific gene mutations.

Add up enough of these specific parameters, and you could have a face. Ever see a police artist work? They focus on attributes more than words. Sometimes they get it right.

Data. The problem will be correlation. If someone starts to join facial records with dna scans in numbers, this may be achievable. And certainly that is available for the general prisoner population in the US.

Not saying it is going to happen. I just wouldn't dismiss it.