Kairos Diversity Recognition

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About

Kairos Diversity Recognition is a face recognition web application developed by the artificial intelligence company Kairos, which analyzes user-submitted portrait photographs and estimates percentages for the subject's ethnic makeup. The results are encouraged to be shared on social media along with the hashtag #DiversityRecognition.

History

On March 11th, 2017, Kairos launched the Diversity Recognition application for users to submit photographs to be analyzed by their facial recognition software. According to a blog post by the company,^[2] the application uses ethnicity detection algorithms to "measure subtleties in the physical characteristics" of millions of processed photographs estimate a person's ethnic background.

Impact

On June 3rd, a thread about the software was submitted to 4chan's /v/^[3] (video games) board, where viewers responded by posting screenshots of various video game characters analyzed by the web application (shown below).

In the coming days, other threads about the Kairos application were submitted to the /co/^[4] (comics & cartoons), /pol/^[5] (politcally incorrect), and /r9k/^[6] (robot 9000) boards. On June 4th, FunnyJunk^[8] user fatsigurd submitted a compilation of #DiversityRecognition images (shown below). On June 6th, a thread urging readers to submit their Kairos results was submitted to ForumBioDiversity.^[7]