Cargill and Cainthus photo
Cargill is backing an Irish startup that uses facial recognition software to help increase the productivity of dairy cows, the latest move by the largest closely held U.S. company to bolster its agricultural-technology efforts.
Cargill has taken a minority stake in Cainthus, which harnesses machine-learning and imaging techniques to identify cows and glean information on everything from their behavior to appetite, David Hunt, president and co-founder of Cainthus, said in a telephone interview Wednesday…
Hunt said Dublin-based Cainthus chose Cargill over venture capital firms because of the U.S. company’s footprint in agriculture. Cargill is still owned by the same family that founded it 153 years ago and it’s one of the world’s largest crop traders and meat producers.
Most farmers in my extended family don’t farm on a scale that would require recognition software to aid productivity. Those with any four-footed critters on the farm know them by their first name. But, of course, I can understand the problem for larger farms and, of course, factory-style farming.
Will Cargill also take the lead in the next logical advance? Eliminate the need for humans to run the farm, run the machinery, deal with harvesting crops – whether animal or vegetable?
Eideard 
Farm of the future in “The Future World of Agriculture” (Walt Disney World EPCOT Center book), published in 1984. https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s–qYXjqGOm–/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/18qibiezx6i9zjpg.jpg “The farmer in this artist’s conception of a farm of the future sits in his computer room (right), studying images of his fields beamed down from a small Landsat satellite. The red spots on the screen indicate crop stress that needs to be corrected. With the aid of his computer, which processes the data and suggests a solution, the farmers solves the problem. Robots in the field (one is seen at far left) take the corrective action ordered by the farmer. At center, the farmer’s wife and child talk to the operator of a huge farm machine used for plowing and planting.”
See also “The Surreal Sci-Fi Farms That Grow Most of Our Food” https://www.wired.com/2014/12/surreal-sci-fi-farms-grow-food/ and http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science_List_Detail.asp?BT=Agriculture
Every year, more cows are milked by robots. https://grist.org/briefly/every-year-more-cows-are-milked-by-robots/ The machines used to be cumbersome and prone to failure, but the newer models really work. They feed cows, milk them, clean them, and carefully monitor their health. According to Bloomberg, robots are staged to surge into dairies in coming years. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/thanks-to-trump-more-u-s-milk-will-be-coming-from-robot-labor
Facial recognition found Capital Gazette suspect among 10M photos : Public Safety official says it’s a “valuable tool for fighting crime in our state.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/maryland-cops-facial-recognition-to-id-capital-gazette-shooter-worked-well/ Maryland authorities used their facial recognition capabilities to identity Jarrod Ramos, the suspect in the Capital Gazette shooting, which left four journalists and one newspaper sales associate dead on Thursday. When he was apprehended at the scene of the horrific crime in Annapolis, Ramos had no identification and seemingly would not speak to police. Investigators then appeared to have taken a mugshot or some other similar type of photo and fed it into the state’s Maryland Image Repository System (MIRS). That database contains approximately 10 million driver’s license images and mug shots, according to documents released by Georgetown University researchers. The result, according to the Baltimore Sun, was a hit for Jarrod Ramos, a 33-year-old man from Laurel, Maryland who apparently had a years-long grudge against the local newspaper.
Civil liberties groups have argued that such programs invade the right to privacy, and some put the technology in the same category as cellphone tracking and aerial surveillance. Its use drew scrutiny after the database was used to monitor protesters during the rioting in Baltimore in 2015 after Freddie Gray’s death.
Maryland’s system has been considered more advanced than those of other states because of the vast number of images available, including more than 10 million from the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration, mug shots and other photographs of arrestees. Some states provide only driver’s licenses, and other states have prohibited the use altogether. http://www.capitalgazette.com/news/for_the_record/bs-md-facial-recognition-suspect-identity-20180629-story.html
Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act filing by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) show that Amazon’s government sales unit was actively seeking to provide the Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations with Rekognition, the controversial facial recognition system. The pitch was part of a larger discussion of Amazon Web Services offerings to ICE HSI, an offering including artificial intelligence algorithms and predictive analytics.
Amazon has provided cloud services to DHS in the past, including US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/amazon-pitched-its-facial-recognition-to-ice-released-emails-show/ See links
“China’s Spying Eyes : Investigating China’s Social Credit system which seeks to reward good behavior and punish what is considered bad.” https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2018/11/china-spying-eyes-181115060044471.html “China’s surveillance is on the rise.
Hundreds of millions of cameras monitor Chinese citizens’ using facial recognition, body scanning and geo-tracking. What people say, do and even think is watched – scrutinised and scored. China’s Social Credit system ranks people as good citizens or bad … to be rewarded or punished. As Big Brother meets Big Data, 101 East investigates how China is implementing the most sophisticated system of social control in history.”
The Police “Every Breath You Take” (1983) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOGaugKpzs
Google employees have signed an open letter calling on the company to abandon its plan for a censored search engine in China, as protesters took to the streets in eight cities to condemn the secretive project. https://theintercept.com/2018/11/27/hundreds-of-google-employees-tell-bosses-to-cancel-censored-search-amid-worldwide-protests/ The search engine was designed by Google to censor phrases about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict censorship rules enforced by China’s authoritarian government. The search platform would link Chinese users’ search records to their cellphone numbers and share people’s search histories with a Chinese partner company — meaning that Chinese security agencies, which routinely target activists and critics, could obtain the data.
“If you thought IBM using “quietly scraped” Flickr images to train facial recognition systems was bad, it gets worse. Our research, which will be reviewed for publication this summer, indicates that the U.S. government, researchers, and corporations have used images of immigrants, abused children, and dead people to test their facial recognition systems, all without consent. The very group the U.S. government has tasked with developing best practices and standards for the artificial intelligence industry, which includes facial recognition software and tools, is perhaps the worst offender when it comes to using images sourced without the knowledge of the people in the photographs.” (Slate Update, March 22, 2019) https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/facial-recognition-nist-verification-testing-data-sets-children-immigrants-consent.html
IRS to abandon facial recognition plan after firestorm of criticism
The agency had planned to require taxpayers send video scans of their face to a private company starting this summer. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/02/07/irs-idme-face-scans/
ID.me—which gathers hordes of data from millions of Americans, including through facial recognition and phone records—managed to get duped by a guy in New Jersey. Federal prosecutors said a New Jersey man used a large, curly orange wig to verify fake driver’s licenses from multiple states, allowing him to obtain $900,000 in federal unemployment funds from California. The revelation is a slap in the face of the company—which was contracted by 10 federal agencies and whose facial-recognition software was dropped by the IRS this week. https://www.thedailybeast.com/eric-jaklitsch-jersey-guy-in-wig-duped-idme-facial-recognition-software-for-dollar900k-in-unemployment-feds-say