D

Disclosure of Unavoidable Conflict of Interest

The conflict-of-interest policy of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (https://www.nationalacademies.org/coi) prohibits the appointment of an individual to a committee like the one that authored this Consensus Study Report if the individual has a conflict of interest that is relevant to the task to be performed. An exception to this prohibition is permitted only if the National Academies determine that the conflict is unavoidable and the conflict is promptly and publicly disclosed.

Professor Anil Jain has a conflict of interest in relation to his service on the Committee on Facial Recognition: Current Capabilities, Future Prospects, and Governance because he is a consultant for Amazon on technologies relating to palm print recognition and has stock holdings in Microsoft Corporation, Amazon.com, Inc., and Rank One Computing.

The National Academies have concluded that for this committee to accomplish the tasks for which it was established, its membership must include at least one person who has current experience in the development and application in industry of facial recognition technologies, biometrics, pattern recognition, and computer vision. As described in his biographical summary, Professor Jain has current experience working on design and applications of pattern recognition systems, focusing on automatic fingerprint recognition, automatic face recognition, and large-scale data clustering.

The National Academies have determined that the experience and expertise of Professor Jain are needed for the committee to accomplish the task for which it has been established. The National Academies could not find another available individual with the equivalent experience and expertise who did not have a conflict of interest. Therefore, the National Academies concluded that the conflict was unavoidable and publicly disclosed it on its website (www.nationalacademies.org).