AI discovers that not every fingerprint is unique
AI discovers that not every fingerprint is unique
From "Law and Order" to "CSI," not to mention real life, investigators have used fingerprints as the gold standard for linking criminals to a crime. But if a perpetrator leaves prints from different fingers in two different crime scenes, these scenes are very difficult to link, and the trace can go ...
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Yeah, "discovers"... what we've known for a long time. But buzzword in the title = clicks (& thus money from ads on the page) so there's that.
They have a specific result though, which is that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person tend to be recognizable as coming from the same person, just from their characteristics. Was that also known for a long time?
Yes, it has been know since forever. It's not like every finger is a different being. There are three well known chemicals related to the creation of fingerprints patterns. We have sequenced the RNA responsible for determining both the timing and concentrations of these three chemicals. We know thus that people's fingerprints all have certain commonalities that can be used to identify that two, different, fingerprints came from the same person. It has been used by police forces for at least a decade now.
If you read about Turing patterns you'll learn more and be already way ahead of these dude's research. They are trying to parade undergrad knowledge under the AI umbrella. Maybe if they knew a thing or two about forensics they would've made a better contribution to science.
The article makes a big point about how this result is not common knowledge and not the commonly accepted viewpoint. To the extent that their paper was rejected for it. Are you saying they made that up?
I haven't read their paper but... the idea that vaccines can prevent against diseases without harmful side effects is also "not common knowledge" fwiw (the level of basic science literacy in most of the Western world is abysmal), and if reviewers rejected the paper then there is a good chance that there is a reason for that.
If you are interested in this topic, here is an excellent (imho) summary video from 6 years ago, which around 9:30 talks about this identical topic. Enjoy! :-) Beware though, from someone who has been down that road: it will make you sad, and the more you learn along these lines, the less hope it will leave you that anything will ever be okay again:-(. I cannot emphasize this enough: I am nowhere close to kidding here.
They copy pasted the Columbia University press release word for word. Which is unfortunately way too common on science journalism. The article just repeats the researchers claims which may or may not hold water. Their main claim that they proved that inter fingerprints aren't unique is just semantic manipulation. That's probably what irked reviewers. Their research doesn't support their claims. At best, they're proposing a mediocre application of AI to detect markers that were already known about.
That makes a lot of sense. It's way too easy to spread BS the way that science journalism works.