UK Home Office dangles £1.3M prize for algorithm that guesses your age The UK's Home Office is offering £1.3 million ($1.7 million) to developers of age-determining software - a tech it wants to deploy widely across its systems. A contract tender posted days ago states the government is looking for an "algorithm that can accurately predict the age of a subject." "Home Office are seeking to …
"algorithm that can accurately predict the age of a subject."
Predict: say or estimate that (a specified thing) will happen in the future or will be a consequence of something.
I know that words change their meanings over time, Burt the article headline is more accurate. They need something to assess a person's age accurately, not predict it at some future time.
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The trick would be to accurately access which are the edge cases and employ other methods to those.
If you have an algorithm that has say 50% with a high accuracy then you only have half the work to do. The higher the accuracy the better.
One potential wrinkle is varying accuracy in different population group, so 90% accurate with white people, 70% accurate with brown people and 30% with black people is not very good in an immigration setting.
We shall see, but concerns are valid.
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Why are they asking for this now? Are they suggesting that (non GDPR compliant) age verification tech they were sure the free market would magically provide doesn't work?
And are they sure they want to spend all that cash on something that can trivially be circumvented as soon as it is released?
It is almost as if our legislators don't know what they are doing. Anyway, I'm off to write some secure but totes backdoorable encryption. It will use AI to decide if you are a Bad Guy or not, because that's how AI works.
Mine's the one thinking of the children while a stranger photographs your children.
There's no way it can work 100% of the time, because there's no way to precisely judge someone's age just based on their appearance.
Presumably the contract will specify the level of accuracy and precision expected. Although if they did that, and then haded the contract to one of their pals touting some kind of AI magic box, then a later government could hold them liable for not meeting targets.So actually, they'll probably say the contracted level of accuracy is a trade secret and that the public aren't allowed to know it.
Correct!
Though it's well known* that to accurately find the age of someone, they need to saw their** leg off and count the number of rings on the stump***.
* i.e. I heard it was true as some bloke down the pub told me.
** in this case, the "their" can refer to both the sawer or the sawee as the results won't matter either way.
*** the most accurate test case was that of a pirate with dual wooden legs - apparently, he was 509.
I don't know how silly this question is, but nevertheless I will ask it.
Tree rings are a known and accurate phenomena and for longer timescales you can use carbon dating.
So, are there any biological markers that would give an indication with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
I am expecting the answer to be no but without a very high degree of confidence. After all a few decades ago individual identification was not possible until the advent of DNA testing.
> So, are there any biological markers that would give an indication with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
No, there's nothing in the human body that is or has the equivalent of tree rings to give a year-by-year age value.
There are age indicators of course (milk teeth, wisdom teeth, puberty etc) but they're not what this technology is after.
The ear bones indicate how mature the body is, not how old it is. So they could indicate the owner has an adult body, without being able to tell they are 14; they could indicate the owner has a child body, without being able to tell they are 22. And you also have the issue that a baby's head is born almost fully sized (ask any post-partum woman), so there's very little change over time anyway.
Let's see: A young lady I knew was regularly carded when she bought anything that required age verification, even when they were happy that her son was an adult.
And a gentleman I worked with had the nickname 'babyface' because... he's older than I am* and looks to be late teens/early 20's at most. His wife loves that. His daughter? She nearly murdered me when I thought she was his wife... (honest mistake! I hadn't met his wife, and his daughter is taller than he is, and takes after him with her training in kickboxing...).
Oh, and on the flip side: I know a teenager who looked to be in his 60's, in addition to the usual bunch of mid-teens who looked like adults. Didn't act like adults and lacked the maturity, but they looked like it.
TL/DR: You can't judge someone's age by their looks. Same as you can't judge a book by the cover.
* And I take after my father in that I look younger than I am - some thinking I'm in my 40's. I remember when all this was fields, computers was a job description rather than a mechanical (and later on, electronic) device, flight was for the birds and visiting the moon was a fantasy.
I've stood on the door of Young Farmers events for decades.
I know that it is very difficult to estimate someone's age with any degree of certainty.
With Young Farmers, all members have to show their membership card with photograph that clearly states their date of birth.
And I can say, with certainty, that I (and all others on the door over the decades) can be up to +/- 5 years out with our age estimates, especially so at the younger end of the spectrum (we allow 16+ at our evening events in my county, with pre-designated and signed in, non-drinking chaperones for the under 18s).
Drink icon as it is Young Farmers!
Yeah, they're asking to solve what is an unsolvable problem. AFAIK there is no reliable connection between Time Since ?Exit Of Womb/?Fertilisation of Ova and one's appearance that is accurate enough to be used in the way they want. It can depend on genetics, nutrition, and the environment in which the child has lived. (For example, menarch can range from 8 to 16 with an average ~12. That's one helluva spread.)
And the worry is that a technology that might report 1% of rich western kids over 18 when they are under (which is bad enough) might be far more inaccurate for those who've grown up in conflicts zones and are malnourished and stressed from the journey here.
It's also extremely culture-specific. Anyone who has travelled abroad much will know that our age-estimation cues are based on subconscious cultural signals. Ask a British man to guess the age of a French or Italian woman, and he'll likely to be way out. If they want to use this to guesstimate the age of travellers at the border they'll need to train it on accurate multicultural data. Good luck with getting that.
The Home Office is spending £1.3m to reinvent skull-measuring. Swap out callipers for a webcam, call it “AI age detection,” and suddenly pseudoscience becomes policy. There is no technology that can tell you someone’s exact age from their face - only rough statistical guesswork, rebranded as accuracy.
But accuracy isn’t the purpose. The point is bureaucratic cover. Once the system is in place, every misclassification becomes “not our fault, the computer said adult.” Children can be pushed into adult detention, adults can slip through as children, and the liability always lands on the black box, never on the Home Office.
It’s digital phrenology with an invoice - expensive, harmful, and designed to move responsibility, not find truth.
I am waiting for Home Office to issue a tender for land on the Moon next.
”[…] Home Office's approach to assessing children's ages, saying its proposals to use scientific measures to more accurately determine undocumented children's ages would be "ineffective, expensive, and harmful."”
Oh, yes, are you gonna start praying to $DEITY for age verification or what?
At least if God does give you an answer it would be an accurate one :)
Not getting an answer is more useful than getting one from any system that does not base it on documents.
What will happen is that some salesman will convince the government they have a solution that will work, lots of money will be spent (a lot more than intended), it will be deployed and not work, then it will be taken down.
How to do govt work:
1. promise whatever is needed to get the same
2. deliver something, even if it is terrible
3. profit!
-- Not getting an answer is more useful than getting one from any system that does not base it on documents --
I presume you have some way of stopping anyone getting a false birth certificate or whatever other document you care to think of.
Another small factoid - a lot of the people coming in via the unofficial routes throw their documents away.
Teeth have growth rings... so every inbound person must donate a tooth... this has the added benefit of being able to locate their origin fairly accurately using isotope analysis. What could possibly go wrong?
/icon just in case anyone thinks I am serious...
Hmm I wonder if you could develop a machine than can image a tooth in situ and count the rings using AI? now that might have legs...of course if the putative migrant has no teeth there might be a problem.
So this person comes and claims they are 13. Goes straight to school appropriate for the age. Benefits go to the guardian who may give them some pocket money. No alcohol until 18. No driving license. Eventually they might get a state pension at age 66 = 53 years from now. “Friends” will be suspect of bring pedophiles. No sex before the age of consent.
However, if they commit a crime they will be treated as adults unless they can prove they are too young. And explain that all very very well if they are suspect of lying.
Just at the point I didn't think HMG could be any more inept and ludicrous at procurement, this absolute belter of a request comes out of the Home Office's Orifice!
This, I will wait with popcorn, to see who is going to tender, based on this nonsense request.
Anyone got a link for the actual Home Office request? I would look, but I'm not going to waste what little horsepower I have left today!
Look at it this way.
HMG keeps coming up with ideas we know are impractical and expecting industry to implement them at industry's own expense or else. HO are prime offenders at this. I keep saying they should provide a proof of concept first.
They're now actually trying this an their (i.e. our) expense. We all know it's going to fail any rigorous trial but AFAIKS such a failure is the only chance of them learning about the reality of what they keep demanding of others. If it works (i.e. if the HO actually learn) then it's a Good Thing.
That's easy. Psuedo code:
10 PRINT "What is your age?"
20 time1 = GetCurrentTime()
30 INPUT entered_age
40 time2 = GetCurrentTime()
50 diff = time2 - time 1 # seconds
60 IF diff < 3 THEN true_age = 18 # or less
70 ELSE IF diff < 5 THEN true_age = 36 # or less
80 ELSE true_age = 54 # or more
90 DELETE entered_age
100 RETURN true_age
One issue with bone age x-rays is that the normal usage case is the other way around - you know the age of the child and you are trying to check the developmental age of the bones to see if there is any problem.
While it is a medically useful technique the datasets that x-rays are being compared against are mostly quite old and there are doubts about their current representativeness. However its difficult to repeat the original studies which generated the datasets because that invovled giving x-rays to thousands of healthy children for no direct medial benefit - something which today would be hard to get past an ethics board. Obviously large numbers of children are getting their hands x-rayed all the time - but by definition a dataset based on routine x-rays would be representative of children who needed an x-ray of their hand, not of children overall which limits its usefulness.
> If children are wrongly judged to be adults, it can lead them to be placed in unsupervised adult accommodation or detention centers, potentially exposing them to abuse.
How about instead of trying to split the world into those who need protection and those who can be abused, you make sure that no abuse takes place in detention centers and also ensure both adults and the underage have access to all the resources and protection they need to be safe?
I have a minor problem with this "The charity rebuked the Home Office in a report [PDF] earlier this year for wrongly classifying hundreds of children as adults"
Whose definition of child and adult are we using? Even in the UK it seems to vary anywhere between 16 & 25 (able to vote and more lenient sentencing in Scotland).
I wonder if the Refugee Council is as outraged about the appalling statistics of adult migrants claiming to be children.
Thought not.
Good god, have these morons never actually observed the real world? The age of a biological entity is a biological process, and biological processes are inherently fuzzy. As an example you have girls having their first periods between 8 years old and 22 years old - that's a TWO HUNDRED FUCKING PERCENT ERROR RANGE. You can have 25% of 18-year-old males six-foot line-backers with stomach-level beard, and 25% of them looking like Harry Potter. My 40-year-old nephew is an airline pilot and looks like he should still be in school. Biology is not nice and beaurocratically exact.
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