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NOTES
Acknowledgments – We’d like to thank all the people who gave us time out of their busy day to share their thoughts, stories and experiences with us. We’d also like to thank the institutions that opened doors for us and welcomed us into their communities. Finally, we’d like to thank Ellie Rennie, our EPIC curator, for her truly helpful comments and support.
1. We will draw upon research primarily from China with some comparative or contrastive sites in the USA. Pseudonyms are used throughout this paper. The research in China was conducted in 2018. We spent two weeks surveying recognition programs in public use in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou. Primarily these were one on one around particular recognition programs, e.g., access to banking, access to work, smiling to pay, etc. While trying to understand how the systems were used (and others they used), we also explored the broader context of their lives. We returned 6 months later and spent 10 days to do deeper dives around recognition systems in educational institutions. We primarily focused on 3 high schools: 2 public and 1 private. The schools discussed in this paper are both public schools. One school was one of the poorer ones in the district, while the other was situated in a university community. All the recognition systems discussed were not yet commercial systems. At the schools, we interviewed a variety of stakeholders: teachers, administrators, staff, students and parents. Independent from the interviews at schools, we talked to representatives of some of the companies that provided the systems to the schools. The school administration asked that their schools names not be used in any report. Likewise, all the participants in the research have been anonymized. None of the systems created for the schools in China were products or services at the time we did our research – they were experiments. High School Z uses a team of parents, teachers, staff and administration to brain storm uses for new applications that they want to bring onto campus. The administrator and IT lead try to find (large or small) companies interested in creating the system for the school, creating public and private partnerships. The public schools in China, in general, when we were in doing the research, had no guidance for systems to build, buy or deploy – everything was an experiment. The research in the USA was primarily site visits. We visited the sheriff’s department in May of 2018 and the St Nicholas school in March of 2019. The facial recognition software used by St Nicholas is a commercial product. The former was done as a part of the exploration of landscape of uses of facial recognition. The later was conducted as a point of comparison to what we had seen in China.
2. When we were in China, the stories about facial recognition systems being used on the Uyghurs had not become content of mainstream media in the USA or China. The stories of facial recognition that were circulating were about people being ticketed for minor offenses (e.g., jay walking), dispensing toilet paper, and criminals being identified and/or caught on the street (or at events), authenticating appropriate car service drivers and so on. The camera surveillance system was primarily explained in terms of safety and civic etiquette, reinforcing the way people were to behave, protecting against those who violate etiquette and laws. No one we talked to wanted to see less recognition systems in place, most had ideas of where they wanted to see more, e.g., “ticket dog poopers who aren’t scoopers” “find my child” “reward appropriate behavior in Starbucks (throwing trash away).”
3. As mentioned, the recognition systems in schools should be considered experiments. The affect system was an experiment to create a better classroom experience for learning. For those in the USA, the in-school experience is a little different, particularly when looking at something like affect detection. The value of the student is judged more on how he/she/they perform on the national exams then on grades in school. Every class I saw, someone slept during class. The reason given was they had been studying non-class material for the national exam until late in the night and were tired. All students and parents talked about the use of materials from outside of the school work to help them with the national exam. The import of the exam vs the school plays out in the various systems in that the evaluation of the system about the student (attentive or not) does not really impact the student as much as such a system might in the USA. Of course, everyone wants to score well on everything, however, whereas a grade in a course might greatly affect a student’s future in the USA, the national exam would affect a student’s future in China. HS X, in part, was using the affect system to try to create a more dynamic learning environment for everyone, in the hopes of improve the overall performance on national exams from their students.
2019 EPIC Proceedings, ISSN 1559-8918, https://www.epicpeople.org/epic