Human Natural Identity and Deepfake Processing - Insights from Super-Recognizers, Law Enforcement and Society

Recent technological advances and related societal issues have led to a surge of both attention towards and misconceptions around the concept of “face recognition”. The arguably most important facet of face recognition — identity processing — is neither a solved, nor easy problem. On the contrary, it is a typically underestimated, highly complex skill that our brains have developed to efficiently master. Generative AI and the ability to create synthetic identities at scale have given rise to entirely novel questions in this field of facial identity processing research. Using examples of ongoing and future work in my group, I argue that studying cognitive and biological mechanisms of human face identity processing can advance our understanding of brain-behavior relationships and hence the development of efficient biologically inspired automatic solutions. Moreover, it can support the development of human-machine interactions, and facilitate an inter-stakeholder exchange necessary to maintain trust in institutions, and enable innovative research opportunities. Creative approaches to using synthetic identities in particular can play a major role in enhancing trust, privacy, and fairness across a range of applications. 

Meike Ramon is a Professor of Applied Data Science at the Business School of the Bern University of Applied Sciences, a Board Member of the Association for Independent Research, an Expert Panel Member for Innosuisse, the Swiss Federal Innovation Agency, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Icelandic Research Fund. As a Swiss National Science Foundation PRIMA (Promoting Women in Academia) Fellow, she founded the Applied Face Cognition Lab, previously directing it at the University of Lausanne and Fribourg. Her PhD is from the Université catholique de Louvain, with a postdoctoral stint at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on face recognition, studying its neurofunctional basis and societal implications, from face-blindness to identifying Super-Recognizers, and the implications of genAI and deepfakes. She collaborates with various international police agencies, including the Berlin Police since 2017, with whom she developed the Berlin Test for Super-Recognizer Identification (beSure®), the only existing bespoke tool for identifying so-called Super-Recognizers involving authentic police material.

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