My current research in the Cinema and Media Arts at York University. My dissertation studies the cinema of facial recognition technologies and their impacts on citizenship, mobility, and crisis. I am currently a member of the Public Visualization Lab, an Elia Scholar, a VISTA doctoral Scholar, and a 2020 Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral fellow.
My work also involves studying the cinema of facial recognition software (FRS) alongside research creation that build and trains FRS using Tensorflow and Keras and employing OpenCV and Python, as well as a variety of publicly-available datasets like FERET, MEDS database, and the recent IBM Faces in Diversity. There is an urgency around the need for public-facing and easily digestible explanations of FRS as it is widely accepted that facial recognition software can, and very often does, contain biases in its code libraries and/or training databases. You can watch this lecture that was given as part of the Ryerson University Centre for Digital Humanities Lunchtime Talks series for a general overview of some of the research directions I am currently taking; you can also scroll down to see some of the conference papers I have given on the topic as well as some of the ongoing research creation projects that I am involved in.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“Against the Deterministic Cinema of Facial Recognition Technologies” Cinephile. 2021.
“Incubating AI: The Collaboratory at Ryerson University Library” The Rise of AI: Implications and
Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Academic Libraries. Co-author, peer reviewed book chapter.
McGill University Press. Forthcoming, Spring 2022.
“Photogénie and Facial Recognition Software” Face Forward: New Approaches to the Face on Screen. Book
Chapter. Ed. Alice Maurice. Edinburgh Press. Forthcoming, Spring 2022.
Creative Works
Invited Talks, Workshops, and Conference Presentations:
“Understanding and Hacking Facial Recognition Software.” Vector Festival. Inter/Access. Toronto, ON.
July-August, 2021.
“Poetry and Objects within Loss Sets.” Canada Science and Technology Museum. Ottawa, September 2021.
“The Operative Moment of a Facial Recognition Technology: Data, Portrait, Moving Image”
Trent University, January 2021.
“The Positive Disruptive Potential of Deepfakes and Synthetic Data.” CSDH. Online, June 2021.
“The Biopolitics of Recognition within Facial Recognition Technologies.” FSAC. Online, June, 2021.
“The FERET Database: Building the Infrastructure for Future Facial Recognition Software.” CCA. Online. June, 2021.
“Solving the Conflict Between Breathability and Masked Faces within Facial Recognition Technologies.”
Online. SCMS. March 2021.