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Facial Recognition Heads to Class. Will Students Benefit?

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This article was originally posted on Inside Higher ED by Susan D’Agostino.

Last week, in a humanities class at a highly selective university in the Northeast, a student played The New York Times’ Spelling Bee game on a phone, according to another student who sat within view. (The source requested anonymity out of concern for retribution.) A third student worked on an essay for a different class on an open laptop, while a student a few chairs away rested their feet on the desk. Another checked LinkedIn and updated a résumé for “quite a while.”

“I think this prof is trying to do whatever she can to get good reviews because she brought cookies to class today and hasn’t said anything all term about people texting from their MacBooks during class,” the disappointed student wrote in a text after class had ended….

It’s Not (Yet) Illegal in Class. But Is It Educationally Sound?

Facial recognition applications have stirred controversy in all parts of the research, development and deployment pipeline, according to Kathleen Creel, assistant professor of philosophy and computer science at Northeastern University. In many cases, data sets of faces used in training the systems before deployment have been collected passively from security cameras or scraped from the internet without consent. In other cases, systems are deployed before problems of racial and gender bias have been addressed.

Continue Reading at Inside Higher ED.

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