Cisco support Simprints to advance ethical, inclusive AI for face recognition biometrics
Sue-Lynn Hinson, Social Impact Investment Portfolio Manager, Cisco Crisis Response, writes a guest blog for us, celebrating a partnership of impact between Cisco and Simprints.
The case for biometric identification
Safe, reliable, and portable forms of ID are necessary to access critical services like healthcare and humanitarian aid. But an estimated 850 million people globally lack formal ID, making it challenging for governments, international development organizations, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to ensure essential services and resources reach their target populations. To address this problem, Simprints has developed a new kind of technology for good: biometric ID, with privacy at its core.
Simprints has been at the cutting-edge of biometrics for a decade now. They’ve built solutions to give people a safe digital identity and ensure every vaccine, every dollar, and every public good not only reaches those who need them most, but does so accurately, efficiently, and equitably. Research shows a digital biometric registry is 12.5 percent more accurate and can be searched three times faster than paper records. And, biometrically tracking reliable health data over time can play a vital role in assessing the success of campaigns like immunization series.
Cisco began supporting Simprints in 2018 as part of our One Billion Lives goal—an ambitious mission to positively impact one billion individual lives through social impact investments. That year, Simprints started testing mobile phone camera-based facial biometrics as an alternative to their existing fingerprint biometric solution, making identification all the more accessible. Operating facial biometrics on Android phones (used commonly in low-resource and last-mile humanitarian contexts) removes the need to produce and distribute separate hardware, thereby cutting costs and increasing scalability. Now, as Simprints marks a decade of impact and innovation, our latest Global Impact Grant is helping the organization advance their ethical, inclusive face recognition AI and make it open source.
Ethical inclusive AI for face recognition
Face recognition is already widely incorporated into everyday technology, seen in cell phones, security cameras, and even used to tag friends in social media posts. But a 2019 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study showed that many commercial face recognition solutions exhibit bias; misidentifying African and Asian faces up to 100 times more than Caucasian faces. This bias, rather than an issue with the technology itself, is a by-product of training AI matching algorithms with datasets that are predominantly male and Caucasian.
Simprints aims to reduce bias in their face recognition models through rigorous training and testing on diverse data sets. They are also exploring the application of training datasets with synthetically generated face images, an innovative approach that enables countless variations on characteristics like skin color, hairstyle, facial features, and facial expressions. In using a synthetic dataset, there is no need to capture and retain personally identifiable information (PII) from real individuals, helping to further maintain data privacy.
To foster trust and confidence among their partners and users, Simprints strictly adheres to policies such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and continuously explores and researches state-of-the-art methods in biometric template protection to ensure subjects are shielded from potential harm or misuse of their biometric data.
Impact across geographies
Simprints’ solutions have been used by humanitarian organizations working in Nigeria, Somalia, and Kenya to prevent fraud and ensure that cash and aid distribution programs reach the intended recipients. Simprints has also partnered with various international Ministries of Health including Ethiopia, Uganda, Ghana, Bangladesh, and Rajasthan, and continues to explore expansion into new geographies.
- In Ethiopia, they are engaged in the ground-breaking roll-out of the electronic community health information system (eCHIS), through which patients are registered and identified by Simprints’ fingerprint scanners.
- In rural Uganda, Simprints has expanded the capacity of frontline community health workers to effectively deliver vaccines that fight infectious diseases such as COVID-19, HPV, hepatitis B, and tetanus.
- In Ghana, their ground-breaking technology is already improving access to critical maternal and vaccine services in 30 health centres, with a plan to scale reach to 500,000 children.
Why open source?
Some technology is so valuable, it’s worth gifting to humanity for the greater good. This is why with support from more than 30 organizations, including governments, researchers, and privacy experts, Simprints has embarked on a journey to make their biometric solutions fully open source. With a mission to transform the way the world fights poverty and disease, Simprints is making their code available to the world and inviting developers, partners, advocates, and all those passionate about addressing global challenges to join their collaborative community. By going open source, and integrating with the leading data collection platforms that serve nearly 50% of the world’s population, Simprints envisions increasing their impact tenfold and empowering teams to reach 20 million people with healthcare and humanitarian aid.
We’re proud to support Simprints as they continue their journey to becoming a digital public good. As they move into a new chapter, we’re excited to work alongside them and impact thousands more lives globally.
