PrincetonUniversity
 

Senior thesis: Watching technology

by Jennifer Greenstein Altmann
Sept. 11 heightened our nation's fears about terrorism and increased our longing for technologies that would improve security. Fortuitously, several companies were already working on a possible savior: face-recognition technology, which uses video surveillance to examine the images of human faces in an effort to nab criminals.

Adam Dressner '02 has studied that technology since last year, when police in Tampa, Fla., installed several dozen cameras on the streets of one neighborhood in an effort to find criminals. "It was heralded as one of the great policing tools," said Dressner, who wrote his senior thesis for the Woodrow Wilson School on face-recognition technology. The technology captured images on video that were cross-referenced with a database of photographs to single out people who were crime suspects.

But the technology had one major glitch, Dressner discovered. It didn't work.

"You can very easily trick the system by changing your appearance," Dressner said. Wearing glasses, donning a mustache or exhibiting the effects of aging can throw the system off. During a six-week period when it was used in Tampa, the technology never produced a correct identification of a face in its database, though it did generate several false matches a day, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union. Among the system's errors was mistaking a man for a woman.

In addition to examining the technology's effectiveness, Dressner studied the social costs of this kind of surveillance. "It's subtly changing the nature of public space. That's the creepiness factor here," said Dressner, who, having grown up in Manhattan, believes the anonymity of walking down a city street should be preserved. Having such cameras hovering over streets could discourage people from participating in political activities such as attending rallies, Dressner pointed out.

Faculty member Stanley Katz, who supervised Dressner's thesis, was impressed by his student's sophisticated thinking. "He has done innovative work on the technological side and on the constitutional side; it's unusual for a student to work those two sides of the street at the same time," said Katz, who is lecturer with the rank of professor in public and international affairs.

And Dressner has distinguished himself by making discoveries in a field in which few scholars are well-versed. "As far as I know, he's one of the few people working on the problem from a social science point of view," Katz said.

Read the full story in the Weekly Bulletin.

Adam Dressner '02 researched the effectiveness and social costs of face-recognition surveillance technology for his senior thesis.

photo illustration: Denise Applewhite