Looking Outwards – Adam Harvey

My speaker was Adam Harvey, who is an American artist and researcher based in Berlin. For college, he studied at Penn State for his bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, and at NYU for his master’s in computational photography and technology. Currently, he works in computer vision, digital imaging, facial recognition, and counter surveillance. His main work involves finding biases in facial recognition algorithms and working backwards to discover flaws in those various algorithms. While it sounds very simple, Adam’s work is incredibly important for our digital safety. Facial recognition is becoming extremely cheap to implement and combining that with the digital world producing so much free information, there is a wealth of data that is at the access of anyone at any time. Through Adam’s work, if he is able to better control and predict the way in which facial recognition will act, it will better protect us in the digital world.

In his presentation, he does a great job of connecting his pictures with his speech so that it doesn’t overload the listener with information. In addition, he does a great job of simplifying the content he is explaining, that makes it clear that he deeply understands what he is talking about, but he is giving just enough information to not overcomplicate it but make it simple enough to understand.

Link to the speaker’s website:  https://ahprojects.com/

Lecture video: https://vimeo.com/channels/eyeo2019

One of their projects that I admire: https://ahprojects.com/megapixels/