Slashdot Mirror
Police Use DNA To Generate a Suspect's Face
An anonymous reader writes: The NY Times has a pair of articles about a technology now being used in police investigations: computer generation of a suspect's face from only their DNA. Law enforcement in South Carolina had no pictures or descriptions of a man who murdered a mother and her daughter, but they had some of his DNA. From this, a company named Parabon NanoLabs used a technique called DNA phenotyping to create a rough portrait of the suspect's facial features, which the police then shared with the public.
The accuracy of these portraits is still an area of hot debate — most of them look rather generic. The NY Times staff tested it with a couple of their employees, circulating the DNA-inspired portraits and seeing if people could guess who it was supposed to be. None of the ~50 employees were able to identify reporter John Markoff, and only about 10 were able to identify video journalist Catherine Spangler. But even though the accuracy for a person's entire face is low, techniques for specific attributes, like eye color, have improved greatly. Of course, the whole situation raises a slew of civil liberties questions: "What traits are off limits? Should the authorities be able to test whether a suspect has a medical condition or is prone to violence should such testing be possible?"
The accuracy of these portraits is still an area of hot debate — most of them look rather generic. The NY Times staff tested it with a couple of their employees, circulating the DNA-inspired portraits and seeing if people could guess who it was supposed to be. None of the ~50 employees were able to identify reporter John Markoff, and only about 10 were able to identify video journalist Catherine Spangler. But even though the accuracy for a person's entire face is low, techniques for specific attributes, like eye color, have improved greatly. Of course, the whole situation raises a slew of civil liberties questions: "What traits are off limits? Should the authorities be able to test whether a suspect has a medical condition or is prone to violence should such testing be possible?"
Yes, I would like a list in descending order.
"What traits are off limits? Should the authorities be able to test whether a suspect...is prone to violence should such testing be possible?"
Because it's hard to tell if someone who killed 2 people is violent....
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Remember when we worried that perverting science was being done in the name of some shark killing?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
one cosmetic cirgury, some colored eye lenses, and some hair colouring and the ADN identification doest work anymore
The suspect is described as slim, 5' tall, and double-helical.
DNA says that the suspect is an African-American male, with brown eyes, dark hair, and dark skin. Anyone with any information on anyone matching the description, please contact the authorities.
When that technology will have evolved enough, it'll be able to show what you were supposed to be from your DNA, compared to what you actually are. How your body and face have changed due to your family, education, school, company etc... That technology will contribute to settle the debate "genetics vs environment".
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
...However, if any of those other countries did the same thing, it wouldn't be OK. In fact, we would be thanking God for the USA and its guarantee of "freedom & liberty" - the Snowden saga not withstanding...
I'm pretty sure it's the lead character from GTA:SA.
seriously, it's pretty friggin generic. the company does good money probably on it.
how about.. along with ordering this from them.. order known faces+dna pairs and see if it's any good.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It was either this guy or this guy.
Sounds more like a case of Parallel_construction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... to me. Its not like the technique is unknown to law enforcement. With all the additional pressure around Stingray (cell site simulator) use, I fully expect these types of techniques to proliferate.
Why is privacy so important? Because you don't know what creepy things governments will do with it in the future. All the condition under which you gave away some of your personal information might not apply in the future. And getting your information back at that time will very likely be no option.
What if your face ends up with this new creepy technology. How can you even possibly defend your self against it? Some, for normal people, impossible to comprehent scientific research apoints you as a suspect. What can you do? This is creepy and scary and not something we should want.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
There was some argument that Derrick Lee was perhaps incompetent to stand trial; during psychiatric evaluations he scored an average of 65 on various standardized I.Q. tests, and a score below 69 is considered to be the threshold for what can be considered mental retardation. Lee was, however, deemed fit to stand trial.
But like phrenology, lie detectors, and to some degree the shrouded witchcraft code of the breathalizer, its a modern tool in the fight against "the bad guy"
Good people go to bed earlier.
Because it searches for correlation between faces and DNA, and it's getting arguably discernible results already. I'm expecting it to improve as it gets more sample data, more processing power, and more researchers identifying distinguishing facial characteristics for it to attempt a DNA correlation to. Further, when they find out how to show examples at different milestone ages, then that would lead to even more interesting applications. Imagine knowing what your baby will look like before they are born... and the societal questions that that brings.
I have no problem identifying these perps.
http://goo.gl/ITTwCA
http://goo.gl/RFlrkG
Sounds a lot like snake oil to me. They have cloned domestic cats and found that the identical DNA used in the cloning produces totally different fur patterns. Here's an explanation why [[www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101215082939.htm]]. While human beings are not cats, it explains that when cells differentiate, random groups of cells become different things (legs, lungs, heart, etc.). Some things (like eye color) may be fixed, but everything else is negotiable. External considerations can also apply, a person who's mother drinks alcohol or takes certain prescription drugs (Thalidomide) can directly affect the appearance of their children, despite what genetics says.
Stay out of Raccoon City.
I can't wait to see the result:
a) They catch the culprit and he looks exactly as the DNA said he would.
b) They catch the culprit and he doesn't look as the DNA said he would.
c) Either a) or b) plus the one they catch is actually innocent.
How they tell which is the truth, who knows?!
...I'd just be happy if our local news stations would share with us such basic facts as the skin color of the bloody suspect.
They seem to avoid it unless the criminals are white or asian, for reasons that likely depend on your political bias; they are failing to describe brown-skinned criminals ....
a) because they're conservative, and assume that you assume 'criminals are brown anyway', or
b) because they're liberal, and they don't want to confirm the stereotype that criminals are mostly brown
-Styopa
There's a Japanese film that tackled this sort of thing. It's called (Platinum Data). Interesting to watch along with something like GATTACA.
My understanding from what I have read about genetics is that usually genetics only affect about 50% of what makes you, you. The rest of the 50% is due to environmental conditions. A mug shot of you that's only 50% accurate is going to be a challenge to use properly.
Often the police can't catch anyone unless someone rats out
the perpetrator.
This stuff is just another way to conceal the true idiocy of the police,
who are pretty much useless unless you are in the government and
need your opposition to be suppressed.
"What traits are off limits? Should the authorities be able to test whether a suspect has a medical condition or is prone to violence should such testing be possible?"
Yes. If the DNA of the murder shows he has diabetes, then they restrict the cops from using that information when searching for suspects? Do you really want to waste time going after people without diabetes while the murder packs up his insulin and skips town?
Soon we'll be able to grow the criminal himself from the DNA and punish him even he's not found.
Handing out multiple life sentences will take on a whole new meaning.
Maybe it would be easier to reconstruct what a person smells like and then 3D print some smell and unleash the hounds..
This "face reconstruction from dna" was used in an spider-man comic a few years back (more than 10).
And what is funny is how even though it was able to reconstruct Peter Parker's face, from a yearss old dead clone's DNA taken from a piece of spider-man costume found in the chimney of a foundry (anyone, decomposed dna???). Peter was able to shrug it off as a mistake by having the machine be "tested" on him beforehand; and thus disregarding the DNA generated head as a system error
If criminals know their DNA will get a thorough health checkup while they can't personally afford such tests....
Some may feel that committing crimes and leaving DNA samples is the only way to get such quality information.
So then the police, in an effort to stop such medically motivated crimes decide to withhold the information which does not directly relate to identification... Leading said criminals to file Lawsuits demanding their own medical data.
Orrrr... The police just run it through the secret DNA database to identify the person and use parallel construction to explain how they found them.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
"None of the ~50 employees were able to identify reporter John Markoff, and only about 10 were able to identify video journalist Catherine Spangler."
So, a crime has been committed, there are ~50 witnesses, of which 'only about 10' are able to identify one person. Statistically significant? What would the police and the courts think?
Oh, and what exactly is 'about 10' people? Somewhere north of 9.75?
Garry Knight
... it would be accurate for someone named 'Dan' who is dyslexic
Funniest post on here for years - thank you!
the suspect's willy is?
Awesome! How long before I can get a lock of hair from someone, then auto-generate an avatar of them?
This won't really work all that well to be honest.
DNA doesn't define a persons face all too well. The DNA only defines a few key foundations.
Their diet, their general health, their own personal hygiene, make-up and style defines the actual finish.
So really, what you'd actually need to end up doing is generating a bunch of possible profiles which would be incredibly more useful.
General a skinny, medium, fat and various other factors and skin features for each. Sure it is more complicated, but it would also help considerably more.
The same should be done for things such as people who have been kidnapped and are gone for years, most importantly, children, who will likely have a known facial profile somewhere unless the family were anti-cameras. Ageing a known face in various ways versus just one is far better and more helpful to actually possibly find someone. (admittedly if someone was kidnapped as a child, they likely don't have that much in terms of a food-heavy diet, so you could eliminate that branch)
Even in the future when we have machines capable of literally growing a human in VR from DNA to [insert age], it still won't work well, you will still need these environment and personality factors to create a bunch of different possible profiles to really get an effective coverage of real life.
Yeah, just looking at the "real" vs "generated" photos.
Noses don't really match up on most of them, nor do eyebrows. The chin is sorta close but without any of the other defining facial characteristics (age lines etc) it's pretty ambiguous. Also, the generated photos have cut out most of the upper-jawbone area so one can't even compare that.
IMHO they seem to be able to give you a decent approximation of the skin tone - minus blemishes - but not much other than that. I'd think that these might actually be counter-productive as you're going to get lots of people that match in a generic way, but the actual match is going to be different enough that people would say "nah, the nose and eyebrows don't match up" or whatever.
They might as well generate his dental work, or diagnosis and cross reference the likely cancer treatments he is likely to have with purchases of any vitamin supplements he may require as a result of genetic deficiencies.
Whats that.. four datasets.... Credit Card History, Dental History, Medical History, Facebook photo. Identify likely diagnoses and filter. Obviously the older you are the easier it is to trace you since you are likely to have certain genetic risk become issues. A few good generic markers and you'll cut it down to a few thousand people.
No, DNA phrenology... Read the bumps in the helix. That shit still isn't dead yet.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
reminds me of a tv documentary, I think of an investigation in Ireland. The perps had left an apple at the scene that had some unusual bite marks in it. The Dentist they showed it to gave a full description of the guy, down to hair color, how tall he was. Apparently some rages/genders/body types were genetically predisposed to gnawing on apples in that way. Of course, now I know about parallel construction... But it made for a great tv show.
Nullius in verba
Sounds like a great idea.
The only thing that comes to my mind is this quote:
"his face is so generic it matches every other face in our database"
Time to offend someone
Sounds like we can add another monumentally flawed technique to the list of schemes law enforcement have created to try to do away with that pesky due process. Seriously gait analysis, lie detectors, bite analysis, hair identification and to a lesser degree fingerprinting & DNA. All have either been shown to be on little if any scientific ground or were used far beyond what the scientific analysis showed was an appropriate use. Fingerprints are a pretty good example. Yes, fingerprints are highly unique, but matching a pristine print taken in a controlled environment and a smudged, grimy and/or partial fingerprint from a crime scene is far from perfect despite the claims of of those in law enforcement.
"A 2006 study by the University of Southampton in England asked six veteran fingerprint examiners to study prints taken from actual criminal cases. The experts were not told that they had previously examined the same prints. The researchers' goal was to determine if contextual information—for example, some prints included a notation that the suspect had already confessed—would affect the results. But the experiment revealed a far more serious problem: The analyses of fingerprint examiners were often inconsistent regardless of context. Only two of the six experts reached the same conclusions on second examination as they had on the first."
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a4535/4325774/
How would any suspect ever mount a defense against looking like one of these pictures? It seems it would be impossible to prove the images are highly made-up. That they'll look like *someone* is a guarantee.
We have mob lawyers, what's next, mob plastic surgeons? They'll adjust your cheekbones and other features so they "mis-match" your DNA, all under-the-table with no medical records.
When you leave your DNA behind it will still match you if you are ever actually arrested, but the DNA-assisted wanted posters will be so different from you that nobody will suspect it is you based on that poster.
DNA is NOT a blueprint that you can read and construct a being from sans any other information.
Every individual's appearance is a product of not just their own DNA, but the environment they developed in. Your mother's body chemistry and other conditions had significant impact on your appearance and other qualities. Everything from bone structure to sexual preference is affected.
We have generated your crime profile. Your arrest will be timed to 3 months prior to your crime.
Move along, citizen.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Looking at the images, it seems that the discrepancies are mostly related to lack of skin complexion details (exact color, texture, sheen), all the sorts of "minor" details that kick many CGI rendered human images into Uncanny Valley. The object rendered looks human-like but our minds scream NOT HUMAN when we don't detect these minor details and cues.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
It would be easier to try matching Mitochondria and Y-chromosome DNA to id maternal and paternal lines.
Wasn't there a dramatic murder gene failed defense in the 90s about people genetically programmed to murder? What if DNA analysis found this to be very true? What if you had certain gene patterns that matched historical prisoners that were found guilty of first degree murder? You know what I would do if we lived in a world like that? Learn how to obfuscate, change those DNA patterns. Then the decision is, do I give it away to everyone or only people that I trust would not murder someone. That power would be immeasurable.
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
They could release a facial construction along with a list of heritable traits such as if the perpetrator has cystic fibrosis, Crohn's disease, lactose intolerance, sickle cell anaemia, or a number of other traits that can be tested for using DNA. If the person tested positive for a rare disease it could go a long way towards finding them.