According to a report published last week by US publication Business Insider, a range of western tech firms are users of FindFace, a controversial face recognition technology developed by Russian startup NtechLab. FindFace matches faces against social media accounts, regardless of privacy rights, among other facial recognition capabilities. Its approach is similar to that developed by US …
The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, has teamed up with its Emirati peer Mubadala to invest “more than 1 billion rubles” (approximately $13 million at the current exchange rate) in Russian face recognition startup NtechLab. Touting itself as “the global leader in computer vision systems based on artificial intelligence and neural networks,” NtechLab provides solutions …
FaceApp, a mobile application that can realistically transform the photo of a person’s face using artificial intelligence, has come under harsh attacks in international media under claims that users’ personal data could be misused. Launched in St Petersburg in 2017 by Wireless Lab (which is now a resident of Russia’s largest tech park Skolkovo), FaceApp has …
Russian AR app FaceApp sparks international controversy over privacy concerns Read More
Russian-speaking engineers seem to have some special skills, or secret sauce, to develop face recognition and related AR technologies, if judging by the number of startups with roots in Eastern Europe that have made the news over the past few years. Emerging from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in particular, they have topped international contests, received …
Why startups from Eastern Europe are so strong in face recognition and augmented reality Read More
Russian startup NtechLab, which creates “algorithms as intelligent as humans and as efficient as machines,” has raised $1.5 million, reports Russian business daily Vedomosti, citing exchanges with the company’s founders and the involved investors. Led by Impulse VC, a venture fund which is reportedly affiliated to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, the fund has also involved …
Russian billionnaire invests in face recognition technology Read More
Now Twitter users can find a random person’s page in the network after taking a photo of them in the street. This functionality — a sort of Shazam for people — is offered by FindFace, an app that can scan Twitter’s database of 313 million active users in less than a second and find a match, if it exists. وان اكس بت The app was made …
Russian face recognition app now available to Twitter users and Turkish police Read More
TechRepublic, an international publication aiming to identify technologies and strategies for IT companies, has highlighted five top Russian startups. “Although Russia’s economy has been tumultuous and the tech landscape is largely associated by Westerners as hacker-centric, a strong technological and entrepreneurial culture has developed in the country over the past half decade and produced a number of …
The FindFace mobile app, which makes it possible to find a random person’s social-media page on Vkontakte after taking a photo of them in the street, has made news headlines for its use in experimental art projects and bullying women who appear in pornography. Daniil Turovsky, special correspondent for independent online publication Meduza, sat down with the authors …
A face recognition app called ‘FindFace‘ is sparking controversy in Russia over the destructive power of new technologies with regards to user privacy. Released in February by NtechLab, a startup established last year in Moscow, FindFace helps put names to faces on a picture. Combining facial recognition software with neural networks, the app will automatically match the image to people’s social media pages on Vkontakte, …
