In April of 2018, the Axon AI and Policing Technology Ethics Board (the board) was formed to provide us with advice on the development of AI products and services. Because of the business we are in, we asked them to pay particular attention to the impact of AI technologies on communities. The first board report provides us with thoughtful and actionable recommendations regarding face recognition technology that we, as a company, agree with. We believe it is important to share and discuss these recommendations here.

Current face matching technology raises serious ethical concerns. In addition, there are technological limitations to using this technology on body cameras. Consistent with the board's recommendation, Axon will not be commercializing face matching products on our body cameras at this time. 

We do believe face matching technology deserves further research to better understand and solve for the key issues identified in the report, including evaluating ways to de-bias algorithms as the board recommends. Our AI team will continue to evaluate the state of face recognition technologies and will keep the board informed about our research.

To date, Axon's work on face recognition has revolved around detecting, tracking and re-identifying faces in videos for the purpose of blurring out or redacting those faces prior to public release, in service of protecting people's privacy rights. “Re-identification” refers to the automated process of finding all the re-occurrences of a person's face in a single video. These algorithms do not attempt to match the identity of the individual to a database, only to identify video frames that are likely to include faces so that they can be redacted. Face detection (not face matching) and re-identification technology improves civic oversight by accelerating the speed and reducing the cost for agencies to disclose videos to the public, while protecting individual privacy during public records release events.

Technology is moving much faster than legislative bodies and courts can respond. Hence, we believe it is critical for technology leaders to work hard to understand the ethical, legal, and community implications for new technologies that are too new to be effectively covered by existing law.

With the guidance of our board, we are committed to developing technologies in an ethical and responsible manner. We will invest in working in a transparent manner and in tandem with leading independent researchers to de-bias training data and algorithms. 

Policing Transparency and Democratic Accountability

Our product development philosophy is clear and includes a wide array of oversight and audit technologies to deter abuse. This includes cartridge serialization (AFID), weapons data logs to record and report usage, integrated TASER cameras and body-worn cameras, automated sensors to activate camera recording, and soon gunshot detection to ensure events involving firearm discharges are recorded. None of these safeguards are required by law, but we see them as the right thing to do. Axon's goal is to build powerful new technologies with the right safeguards in place within the spirit of legal and ethical frameworks and community expectations. The board supports us in our pursuit to more clearly define and establish our ethical framework for new products. Our goal is to put the formal ethical framework policy in place later this year. We also share the board's desire to build the appropriate tools that will allow agencies to release to the public the appropriate data about the use of Axon products.

We thank the members of our board for the advice they have provided us, and we appreciate the time and effort that each member has dedicated to this effort. Outside ethical advisory boards like this are a new concept among technology companies, and we are proud to embrace it and design an ethical roadmap that we hope other companies can emulate. Our hope is that Axon’s and the board’s lessons learned can help guide other companies and organizations that may be considering implementing similar advisory boards. 

Axon has formed an AI ethics board to give advice on the development of AI products and services. Read the first board report to see recommendations regarding face recognition technology we agree with.

AI Ethics Board Report

ARTICLE: AI Ethics Board Report

By: Rick Smith

The Future of Face Matching at Axon and AI Ethics Board Report

Hear Stuart McKee, National Technology Officer - U.S. Public Sector, from Microsoft and former Axon VP of AI and Machine Learning talking about how we believe building responsible and trusted AI is important. Axon has established AI Ethics Board to guide our AI research, and makes sure that our work is CJIs compliant. Watch the Webinar below to learn more.

Learn from Axon and our partner Microsoft about Ethical AI application in Law Enforcement

Ethical AI in Law Enforcement Webinar Replay

Learn from Axon and Microsoft about AI application in Law Enforcement

Axon Ethical AI in Law Enforcement Webinar

ARTICLE: Ethical AI in Law Enforcement Webinar

Ethical AI in Law Enforcement Webinar

It's not often that companies the size of Axon are compared favorably to Google. But it happened last week in a Forbes article:

"This week, Axon ... demonstrated the kind of transparency that Google should aspire towards when it announced an AI ethics board to 'help guide the development of Axon's AI-powered devices and services'."

Let's recall that Google started with a machine-learned algorithm called PageRank. Since then, it has been a powerhouse for machine learning (ML), and arguably no other company has commercialized ML and artificial intelligence (AI) more than Google. They have also been paying attention to the ethical side of AI for a relatively long time. DeepMind's ethics board was formed in 2014. In his 2017 Founders’ Letter, Sergey Brin (the Google co-founder with the beard - in case you mix them up like I do) writes about AI: “such powerful tools also bring with them new questions and responsibilities. How will they affect employment across different sectors? How can we understand what they are doing under the hood? What about measures of fairness? How might they manipulate people? Are they safe?”

So being positioned above Google in the AI ethics space is a tall order.

For most people, the conversation about ethics of AI starts with the thought of sentient AI that could take over and rule us all one day. Before a congressional hearing on AI, Congressman Hurd asked people on the street about AI, and no surprise, most people's idea of AI is formed by movies. Naturally, doomsday scenario is the #1 notion in their mind.

The AI-apocalypse-frenzy has happened many times when a new technology has made a breakthrough. The printing press, the Internet, the mobile phone, Snapchat...the list goes on. Perhaps when the wheel was invented, concerned parents were skeptical. At the same time, if data is the new oil as they say, we obviously made a mess with the previous oil we discovered.

Which scenario is going to unfold then? Is it going to be all rosy or all gloomy? What can we do about it? Freeze and take no action? Or take a swing and see how things will unfold?

We don't have to accept what the movies or any pundit or expert predicts. We can help forge the world around us at present and create the future. There are talkers - people who freeze at the sight of any potential change and their only response is inaction and talking about how things are not going to work out. And then there are doers - people who work on making the world a better place every day by facing challenges, taking risks, and walking into uncharted territories. At Axon we are doers, and we believe that the world will be a better place with AI, if developed responsibly.

As a technologist, I believe that technology should—as it has in many cases so far—allow us to be more human. I am optimistic that AI, done the right way, will allow us to be more human.

The Michael Jordan of ML wrote in a recent blog post that what is clumped together as “AI” these days can be divided into three main categories which are in fact different things:

Human-imitative Artificial Intelligence (HIAI): Making machines that understand the world and have similar cognitive capabilities as humans. This is what most people know as AI.

Intelligence Augmentation (IA): The kind of AI that augments human intelligence and improves our productivity. The same way that eyeglasses can make us see better or cars can make us move faster, this kind of AI can enable us to do more by achieving higher levels of cognitive abilities. Examples include search engines and smart speakers.

Intelligent Infrastructure (II): When we use AI to improve the infrastructure of our information-based society and usually involves many connected devices. For example, Uber uses AI to create an Intelligent Infrastructure that moves millions of people around the world every week, and dating websites use AI to create an intelligent infrastructure for matching couples.

At Axon, the AI Research Team has focused on #2 and #3 and not on #1. We see AI as an assistant to our customers in public safety. It will help and support them in making decisions. It will provide a very effective set of tools for the officers to do more (efficiency) and have better access to crucial information and real-time safety measures (vigilance). In doing this we ensure that our AI technologies complement and augment the human intelligence while leaving all decision making to human judgment. In short, Axon AI technologies will empower the officers to be more human.

We do our AI development while keeping the ethical aspects front and center to every step of the process - from data collection to model training, inference, evaluation, and interpretation of the results. By avoiding AI type #1, we ensure that there is always a human-in-the-loop to make the final judgments whenever there might be a risk of impinging upon privacy or civil rights. Axon's AI Ethics Board keeps us in check.

We are committed to ensuring that the technology we develop makes the world a better and safer place. Our first-of-its-kind AI Ethics Board is a profound statement in that direction.

We are nowhere near done. There will be critics who point out shortcomings, fairly or unfairly, but this is a journey and it matters that we have started it. Theodore Roosevelt once said:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, [..] who does actually strive to do the deeds;

WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT AXON'S AI RESEARCH? Learn More

Axon AI team shares the vision for the AI research, focusing on ethical development of Intelligence Augmentation (IA) and Intelligent Infrastructure (II).

ARTICLE: Responsible AI

Axon is leading the industry in Responsible AI

The development of body-worn cameras for law enforcement created a new way to collect and manage evidence and provided a clearer avenue of transparency between officers and citizens. However, this new technology initially created a vacuum around how to govern the use of this new tool. Prior to the wide deployment of body cameras, state, county, and municipal governments did not have specific laws or policies to deal with such technology. Many states did have some laws that were applicable to body-worn cameras as it relates to two-party consent or restrictions of recordings where privacy is expected, but these laws were not enacted for dealing with body-worn cameras.

The question became: do these current laws apply to body cameras — and if so, how — or do new laws need to be drafted and enacted to deal with this emerging technology?

Well, the answer to this question is complex and still being debated nationwide. The reason why it is so complex, is because all 50 states, the District of Columbia, large cities, and county governments are each individually forming laws and policies that govern the use and deployment of body-worn cameras. There is no one policy or nationwide law, but varying guidelines based on a web of state, county, or city laws and regulations. These laws and regulations may be drastically different depending on what part of the country you find yourself in.

State and local laws and policies, are living, breathing documents that can stand the test of time or be changed without a moment’s notice.

In general, about 30 states and the District of Columbia have created some type of law regarding body-worn cameras. The initial trend of legislation in 2014 and 2015 mostly focused on authoring government to create commissions or committees to study body-worn cameras or to begin to pilot and evaluate the technology. In many cases, the primary purpose of these commissions was to create recommendations on best practices and policies for a body-worn camera program.

As state and local governments gain more information from studying body-worn cameras, and as their local law enforcement agencies, began to test the technology, a second wave of legislation began. This second wave, in late 2015 and 2016, focused on public access to body-worn cameras footage, creating standard policy requirements, requiring certain type of officers to be equipped with cameras, and creating grant programs to help law enforcement agency procure the technology.

The legislation we are seeing in 2017 is similar to 2016. States are continuing to push for standardization of policy, this time around the balance of keeping police data for evidence and allowing public access to the data for transparency purposes. In addition, we are seeing, in some cases, legislation that would adjust state laws already pertaining to body-worn cameras to allow for easier use of the technology. This comes through trial and error. It is difficult to legislate new technology before seeing it fully deployed and operational for a few years.

State and local laws and policies, are living, breathing documents that can stand the test of time or be changed without a moment’s notice. As body-worn cameras become standard issue over the next few years, and as new hardware and software features are added to body-worn camera programs – new laws and regulations will continue to be promulgated.

The development of body-worn cameras for law enforcement created a new way to collect and manage evidence and provided a clearer avenue of transparency between officers and citizens. Learn about the history of body-worn camera policy in this article written by Esmael Ansari, Axon Director of Government Affairs.

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The Future of Face Matching at Axon and AI Ethics Board Report

Ethical AI in Law Enforcement Webinar

Axon is leading the industry in Responsible AI

History of Body-Worn Camera Legislation