An AI lie detector will interrogate travellers at some EU borders
An AI Lie Detector
Is Going to Start Questioning Travelers in the EU
Melanie Ehrenkranz October 31, 2018 12:25pm
A number of border control checkpoints in the European
Union are about to get increasingly—and unsettlingly—futuristic.
In
Hungary, Latvia, and Greece, travelers will be given an automated lie-detection
test—by an animated AI border agent. The system, called iBorderCtrl, is part of a six-month pilot led by the Hungarian
National Police at four different border crossing points.
“We’re employing existing and proven
technologies—as well as novel ones—to empower border agents to increase the
accuracy and efficiency of border checks,” project coordinator George Boultadakis
of European Dynamics in Luxembourg told the European Commission.
“iBorderCtrl’s system will collect data that will move beyond biometrics and on
to biomarkers of deceit.”
The virtual border control agent will
ask travelers questions after they’ve passed through the checkpoint. Questions
include, “What’s in your suitcase?” and “If you open the suitcase and show me
what is inside, will it confirm that your answers were true?” according to New Scientist. The
system reportedly records travelers’ faces using AI to analyze 38 micro-gestures,
scoring each response. The virtual agent is reportedly customized according to
the traveler’s gender, ethnicity, and language.
For travelers who pass the test, they
will receive a QR code that lets them through the border. If they don’t, the
virtual agent will reportedly get more serious, and the traveler will be handed
off to a human agent who will asses their report. But, according to the New
Scientist, this pilot program won’t, in its current state, prevent anyone’s
ability to cross the border.
This is because the program is very
much in the experimental phases. In fact, the automated lie-detection system
was modeled after another system created by some individuals from iBorderCtrl’s
team, but it was only tested on 30 people. In this test, half of the people
told the truth while the other half lied to the virtual agent. It had about a
76 percent accuracy rate, and that doesn’t take into consideration the
variances in being told to lie versus earnestly lying. “If you ask people to
lie, they will do it differently and show very different behavioral cues than
if they truly lie, knowing that they may go to jail or face serious
consequences if caught,” Maja Pantic, a Professor of Affective and Behavioral
Computing at Imperial College London, told New Scientist. “This is a known
problem in psychology.”
Keeley Crockett at Manchester
Metropolitan University, UK, and a member of the iBorderCtrl team, said that
they are “quite confident” they can bring the
accuracy rate up to 85 percent. But more than 700 million people travel through
the EU every year, according to the European Commission, so that percentage
would still lead to a troubling number of misidentified “liars” if the system
were rolled out EU-wide.
It’s slightly reassuring that the
program—which cost the EU a little more than $5 million—is only being
implemented in select countries in a limited trial period. It is crucial for
such a system to collect as much training data as possible, from as diverse a
pool of travelers as possible. But systems dependent on machine learning,
especially ones involving facial recognition technology, are to date still very flawed and deeply biased. At a time when crossing
borders is already contentious and unfairly biased, throwing
a partial, imperfect “agent” into the mix raises some justified concerns.
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