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Facial composite produced by Parabon Nanolabs [https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/posters (accessed 26/03/2020)]
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Forensic DNA phenotyping (FDP) encompasses a set of technologies geared towards inferring externally visible characteristics from DNA traces found at crime scenes. As such, they are used to generate facial renderings of unknown suspects. First, through the configuration of molecularly inscribed parts, pigmentary traits are assembled into a probabil...
Citations
... Following are the main insights that are found through different papers: Current criminal sketches rely on eyewitness memories, resulting in inaccuracies [7]. The system for retrieving evidence photos needs improvement [17]. Existing studies mostly focus on facial features, neAglecting additional information like skin and eye color [8]. ...
In this cutting edge, the common wrong doing rate is expanding day-by-day and to manage up with this the criminal divisions as well ought to discover ways in which would speed up the by and large preparation and offer assistance in bringing one to justice. In response to rising crime rates, law enforcement agencies are turning to advanced algorithms capable of matching freehand sketches with images in databases. These algorithms, utilizing sophisticated feature extraction techniques and deep learning models, significantly enhance identification accuracy. By leveraging Sketch based image retrieval technology, investigations are expedited, leading to quicker suspect apprehensions and resolution of criminal cases. This results in improved public safety and justice outcomes, as well as more efficient law enforcement practices overall.
... For the lack of attention to more mundane technologies in policing is not limited to police organizations themselves, but is reflected in social studies of science as well. Whereas ample attention has been paid to FDP (see Hopman, 2021;Hopman and M'charek, 2020;M'charek, 2016Ossorio, 2006;Wienroth et al., 2014), facial composite drawings have received relatively little (for an exception see Nieves Delgado, 2020). ...
... Analyses can, for example, be requested that indicate whether it is more likely for a particular suspect to have blue or brown eyes, red or black hair, or give clues towards their biogeographical ancestry. This latter method is often referred to as 'indirect phenotyping' (Koops and Schellekens, 2008), because it does not predict appearance directly but rather hints at what a suspect might look like through reference to geographical distributions of genetic markers (Fujimura and Rajagopalan, 2011;Hopman and M'charek, 2020). Most of these analyses are based on research into particular mutations on the genome called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. ...
... Indeed, Parabon's Snapshot service presents composites that ask to be taken as 'life-like'. 4 They perform the idea that this is a particular person, the suspect police are looking for (see also M'charek, 2016;Hopman and M'charek, 2020). Moving from this digital face to the diagrams at the bottom of the image, the viewer is furthermore given the impression that this is the result of statistical analyses. ...
In this article we take two forensic technologies used to generate facial renditions of suspects, forensic DNA phenotyping (FDP) and facial composite drawing, to think through innovation in policing. Comparing more mundane, taken-for-granted approaches of facial composite drawing with 'high-tech' facial renditions generated using DNA traces, we complicate the value of technological innovation in the criminal investigation. Drawing on participant observations conducted with the Dutch police, forensic genetic laboratories and interviews with investigators and geneticists, we detail some of the technicalities behind the making of faces using these technologies, and show the differences in how the technologies are perceived and applied in policing. With our comparison, we show that although facial composite drawing is often quickly dismissed as being subjective and unreliable, the practice holds important lessons for FDP, in particular FDP's promise of producing a photographic likeness of a suspect. With that, we demonstrate that besides introducing 'new' things, innovation may also be located in more mundane and taken-for-granted technologies such as facial composite drawing. We conclude by suggesting that police and technology developers alike take existing technologies and practices more seriously , redirecting the focus of innovation towards the affordances of the mundane.
... Forensic evidence sketches are usually made by taking the details from witnesses which has more chances of inaccuracy and the difficulty or incomplete liability of witnesses, leading to inaccuracies and shortcomings. R. Hopman and A. M'charek [2] most effectively considers important aspects of a suspect's appearance and consists of a face and part of a forensic cartoon. Additional semantic information was overlooked, in addition to things like pores, skin tone, and eye color. ...
An overview to the Sketch Based Image Retrieval for Criminal Record where the user provides a sketch as input to the system to retrieve relevant images from the database. It is seen that traditional methods to draw the face sketch are still difficult and time consuming. This system is developed so that the identification of criminals is done faster than the traditional method. Therefore, the paper presents a simple and effective deep learning framework where user can create the sketch of the suspect and can be matched to the database to get the relevant criminal images. It mainly uses Histogram Oriented Graph, Support Vector Machine, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks machine learning algorithms for face landmarks estimation, feature extraction and pattern matching. SBIR proves to be more efficient and faster to process the criminal face in real-time, as time plays an important role in immediate action in the crime branch.
... Therefore, a race-related facial phenotypes can be considered to be specific to such facial characteristic attributes, which can then also be correlated to race ("Phennotopically similar individuals are expected to be genetically more similar as well. ", [68]). ...
Facial recognition is one of the most academically studied and industrially developed areas within computer vision where we readily find associated applications deployed globally. This widespread adoption has uncovered significant performance variation across subjects of different racial profiles leading to focused research attention on racial bias within face recognition spanning both current causation and future potential solutions. In support, this study provides an extensive taxonomic review of research on racial bias within face recognition exploring every aspect and stage of the face recognition processing pipeline. Firstly, we discuss the problem definition of racial bias, starting with race definition, grouping strategies, and the societal implications of using race or race-related groupings. Secondly, we divide the common face recognition processing pipeline into four stages: image acquisition, face localisation, face representation, face verification and identification, and review the relevant corresponding literature associated with each stage. The overall aim is to provide comprehensive coverage of the racial bias problem with respect to each and every stage of the face recognition processing pipeline whilst also highlighting the potential pitfalls and limitations of contemporary mitigation strategies that need to be considered within future research endeavours or commercial applications alike.
... The desire for Prediction by Precision is what motivates many instances of personalization inside and outside medicine (Mackenzie 2017). It is both cause and consequence of innovation in methods that not only change practices of classification but also how variance or distributions of attributes or features within a population are established (Amoore 2013;Hopman and M'charek 2020). Indeed, while Cardon (2019) suggests that statistical categorization has been called into crisis by the individualization of social processes, we have found that they continue to be at least to some degree interdependent: for example, some techniques of inter-relating liking and likeness benefit from the increasing interoperability of data updated in practices of Participation that are individualized in a variety of ways. ...
... It points to a political arithmetic that creates attributes constituted in fractal relations of liking and likeness rather than socio-demographic characteristics (for example, gender, age and ethnicity). Nonetheless, their value arises in part because they can be and arecontinually superimposed on the latter, so that in this case race operates as an absent presence (Hopman and M'charek 2020). 19 In other examples, the categories, genres or types produced in these mappings of publics onto populations are highly variousas in the examples (Figure 7) of 'I am research', 'I am train', #JesuisCharlie or 'type of cancer responding to this type of treatment at this point in time'but all have a variety of implications for how people are included (or not), how they attach to or (dis)identify with a category or feel that they belong. ...
... 25 While we recognize that this form of assetisation is linked to economization or neoliberalism, we found that the social, economic and political implications of the assets emerging from the distributive logic of P by P by P are highly varied. Some are branded but by no means all; they include, for example: #MeToo; #longcovid; digital and biological phenotypes including organoids and the 'liquid' biopsies collected in the EBLIS study discussed above; AMSR boyfriend role-play videos such as Denni-sASMR); Microsoft's MyAnalytics; a 'suspect population' (Hopman and M'charek 2020); and #BlackLivesMatter. ...
Scholarship on the history of political arithmetic highlights its significance for classical liberalism, a political philosophy in which subjects perceive themselves as autonomous individuals in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable in a deluge of printed numbers, assisted by the development of statistics, the emergence of a common space of measurement, and the calculation of probabilities. Our proposal is that the categories, numbers, and norms of this political arithmetic have changed in a ubiquitous culture of personalization. Today’s political arithmetic, we suggest, produces a different kind of society, what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the ‘default social’. We address this new social as a ‘vague whole’ and propose that it is characterized by a continuous present, the contemporary form of simultaneity or way of being together that Benedict Anderson argued is fundamental to any kind of imagined community. Like the society imagined in the earlier arithmetic, this vague whole is an abstraction that obscures forms of stratification and discrimination.
... Germany and Switzerland and the application of these technologies in prominent cases in different European countries. To this end, we draw on the analytical concept of 'racialization' in order to shed light upon the interdepencies, institutional settings, practices and underlying historically sedimented images which reinforce essentialised categories and create divisions between groups (Hopman and M'charek, 2020;. Accordingly, with reference to Miles' and Brown's definitional framework, we employ the concept of racialization "to denote those instances where social relations between people have been structured by the signification of human biological characteristics in such a way as to define and construct differentiated social collectivities" (Miles and Brown, 2003: 101). ...
Over the last two decades, the analysis of DNA traces found at a crime scene have expanded the already established forensic DNA analysis for identification to include new techniques intended to predict a criminal suspect's externally visible characteristics, such as eye, hair and skin colour ('forensic DNA phenotyping'), or his or her ethnic, continental or regional origin ('biogeographical ancestry'). In this paper, we conduct a dispositive analysis to investigate how extended DNA analysis in forensics catalyses inherent processes of racialization at three different levels: 1) in the categorizations that are integral to this technology, 2) in the images of the 'dangerous other' combined with inflated expectations regarding these technologies' effectiveness that have framed discourses regarding the legalization of this technology, and 3) in the biases and stereotypes which often guide investigative practices using these technologies. We demonstrate that this is an example par excellence of how the interaction between different practice dimensions can exacerbate unintended discriminating, racialising and racist effects.
... Predicted phenotypes that characterize minority ethnic populations can therefore be seen as valuable in a similar way, but are problematic in that they focus attention on groups that are often already the target of excessive police attention [69][70][71]. In providing a probability of belonging to a particular group or having a particular appearance, these kinds of tests point not to an individual suspect, but a pool or collective of similar suspects [72], and thus to the potential victimization of a community. ...
In his famous 1972 paper, Richard Lewontin used ‘classical’ protein-based markers to show that greater than 85% of human genetic diversity was contained within, rather than between, populations. At that time, these same markers also formed the basis of forensic technology aiming to identify individuals. This review describes the evolution of forensic genetic methods into DNA profiling, and how the field has accounted for the apportionment of genetic diversity in considering the weight of forensic evidence. When investigative databases fail to provide a match to a crime-scene profile, specific markers can be used to seek intelligence about a suspect: these include inferences on population of origin (biogeographic ancestry) and externally visible characteristics, chiefly pigmentation of skin, hair and eyes. In this endeavour, ancestry and phenotypic variation are closely entangled. The markers used show patterns of inter- and intrapopulation diversity that are very atypical compared to the genome as a whole, and reinforce an apparent link between ancestry and racial divergence that is not systematically present otherwise. Despite the legacy of Lewontin's result, therefore, in a major area in which genetics coincides with issues of public interest, methods tend to exaggerate human differences and could thereby contribute to the reification of biological race.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Celebrating 50 years since Lewontin's apportionment of human diversity’.
... Second, we aim to contribute to the STS literature on the (re-)surfacing of race in forensic practices, the case of facial composite drawing. In contrast to the ample work produced on race and novel forensic DNA technologies (see for example Ossorio, 2006;Sankar, 2012;Schwartz-Marín et al., 2015;Skinner, 2018;M'charek et al. 2020;Hopman and M'charek, 2020), the mundane forensic practice of facial composite drawing has not yet received any attention from STS scholars (one exception is Nieves Delgado, 2020). Combining written text with audiovisual montage, we demonstrate how race comes to matter in the practice of facial composite drawing. ...
Methods have been recognised in STS as mattering for a long time. STS ethnographies establish a boundary object with which STS scholars weave a pattern: From such ethnographic accounts we learn that knowledge is produced locally. Ethnography has over the recent decades been highlighted as a key method in STS. And that STS ethnography is specifically shaped by being often configured to consider its forms of collaboration or intervention in the field. This special issue focuses on how methods matter, specifically on how STS ethnographic collaboration and its data are translated into ethnographic writing, or performative of other reality effects. Exploring STS’s own methods-in-action brings to attention the messy landscape of method practice. Our objective in this exploration is to develop a genre of writing about method that fosters response-ability and enables the audience of research output to position themselves between the research materials and practices that were invested into the study. This special issue hopes to contribute to STS engagement with its methods by way of methodography. Methodography serves as a genre of analytic writing, that articulates specificity and scrutinises the situated practices of producing STS knowledge.
https://sciencetechnologystudies.journal.fi/article/view/110597/65291
... interpersonal nature of most expressions of our identity (Hopman & M'Charek, 2020). Following a tradition of identification technologies, ' intensified regimes of surveillance, securitisation and control' (Lyon, 2008;Cheesman, 2020) would tend to emerge, further solidifying existing inequalities (Gstrein & Kochenov, 2020). ...
The concept of self-sovereign identity (SSI) describes an identity management system created to operate independently of third-party public or private actors, based on decentralised technological architectures, and designed to prioritise user security, privacy, individual autonomy and self-empowerment.
... Second, we aim to contribute to the STS literature on the (re-)surfacing of race in forensic practices, the case of facial composite drawing. In contrast to the ample work produced on race and novel forensic DNA technologies (see for example Ossorio, 2006;Sankar, 2012;Schwartz-Marín et al., 2015;Skinner, 2018;M'charek et al. 2020;Hopman and M'charek, 2020), the mundane forensic practice of facial composite drawing has not yet received any attention from STS scholars (one exception is Nieves Delgado, 2020). Combining written text with audiovisual montage, we demonstrate how race comes to matter in the practice of facial composite drawing. ...
This methodographic paper explores the performativity and materiality of methods in STS research practice. Studying the absent presence of race in facial composite drawing in the Netherlands, the confidential nature of criminal investigations put constraints on our possibilities to study this practice. To generate data to work with, we created an ethnographic experiment producing two facial composites in collaboration with two forensic artists. We recorded the drawing process using a variety of (audiovisual) technologies to produce different materializations of the event. Tinkering with and analyzing the generated materials sensitized the ethnographers to three different modes of doing difference in which race surfaces in the process of facial composite drawing: 1) touching as describing; 2) layering and surfacing; and 3) articulating the common. We argue that different modes of doing ethnography, for instance, conducting research with audiovisual and experimental methods, can open up new ground to approach difficult and slippery objects such as race.
