Amazon Schooled on AI Facial Technology By Turing Award Winner

Yoshua Bengio is among 26 AI scientists calling for Amazon to stop selling Rekognition to police

The logo of Amazon Web Services Inc (AWS) is displayed on a sign ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 21, 2019.

Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg

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By Dina Bass

April 3, 2019 at 4:00 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

Amazon.com Inc.’s facial-recognition software is coming under fire again, this time from a group of artificial intelligence researchers that includes one of the field’s most prominent scientists.

Twenty-six researchers, including Yoshua Bengio, a recent winner of the Turing Award, the industry’s highest honor, called for Amazon to stop selling its Rekognition AI service to police departments in a post on Wednesday. Bengio was joined by Anima Anandkumar, a former principal scientist at Amazon’s cloud division, and staffers from Google, Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc. and several universities.