Project Flin Flon - For Licentiates

This is an opportunity to practice your skills on a real project.

Super Recognisers International were contacted earlier this year by a member of Flin Flon’s Heritage Project with a proposal for a collaborative project.

Please note: This is a voluntary project open only to Licentiate Members of the Association of Super Recognisers who have completed the SRI Training Course and qualified as a Super Recogniser or Face Matcher.

What is Flin Flon? Flin Flon is a small mining town in Canada on the Manitoba/Saskatchewan border. The town, founded in 1927, was once a thriving place with one of the richest mines in Canada, employing 15,000 people. The mine is slowly winding down and is expected to close in 2022. Our contact, Doug Evans, grew up in the town from the age of 5 weeks old when the accommodation comprised of only log cabins and tents. He is a member of the Flin Flon Heritage Project and curates much of its photographic collection. For more information on the town of Flin Flon please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flin_Flon

Flin Flon Heritage Project website:

http://flinflonheritageproject.com

The Collaborative Project - Background Information Flin Flon had an huge archive of old photos that was informal and without organisation. Flin Flon town volunteers went through the collection, documenting the photos. Sadly a flood destroyed their index, though the photos were saved. There is a large number of images of important people who established the town, many with no names attached and their identity unconfirmed. The Heritage group decided to make a digital archive for the web. People began sending in shoeboxes of old photos. The collection now contains approximately 50,000 photos. A club was formed for those who worked in the mine around 1927, the “27 Club”. Most photos we have were taken around 15-20 years after the initial activity in the mine and the project would like to centre on these characters. We have been given images from around 1926 onwards, when the mine was being developed. Some of these images depict a time when the only access to the mine was by canoe or steamboat!

How to get involved We have two sets of images. Set 1 depicts members of the founding members of Flin Flon, the “1927 Club”. Names are written either on the image or the reverse of the photo. These give us our KNOWN images. Set 2 is a selection of photographs depicting UNNAMED people from the early years of the mine. Your task is to study both sets of images and if possible, identify some of the unknown (unnamed) persons. There is no right or wrong, your submission is subjective and purely your own opinion. I will collate the results and submit them to the Flin Flon Heritage Project once all findings are received. How to present your report I would like you to present your report in any way you feel works well and are comfortable with. Your findings should be presented clearly and professionally. I will be looking for accuracy and attention to detail. The reader should be able to understand your report quickly and easily. An instinctive reaction is not enough for an identification, you must present your reasoning behind the identification. Your work will give me an insight into how you approach a task. I will not give guidance as to the exact way you present your report, I would like to see your own interpretation without my influence! If you would like to be involved in this project, please email me at:

kelly.hearsey@superrecognisersinternational.com

and I will send you all you need to get started. This is a fabulous opportunity to practice your skills and demonstrate your ability. I hope you will find this an enjoyable project to be involved in and look forward to hearing from you. Closing date to submit your findings is 20th June 2021.

New UK Surveillance Camera Commissioner - Quizzed by Association CEO→

The new SCC, Fraser Sampson, appeared on a webinar for the CCTV User Group. Our CEO, Mike Neville, was able to ask questions regarding measuring the police use of CCTV. This, no doubt, would increase the use of images to solve crime and would result in more Super Recognisers being utilised.

Watch our Snapshot Webinar: New Surveillance Camera Commissioner talks CCTV, regulation and funding (cctvusergroup.com)

Why Law Enforcement Agencies Need HUMAN Super Recognisers→

Why law enforcement needs HUMAN super recognisers..... All automated facial recognition matches MUST be verified by a HUMAN with the right skills. My team can find the officers and staff with this skill in police forces. It unacceptable to jail the innocent from non-verified computerised facial recognition matches.

https://amp-cnn-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/04/29/tech/nijeer-parks-facial-recognition-police-arrest/index.html

Super Recogniser Crime Exercise Day - London - Interested?

One of the fun parts of a Super Recogniser (face to face) course is the exercise, where SR operatives are given a police style briefing and then deploy to a busy venue to patrol and observe to spot “terrorists” or “criminals”. Can the Super Recognisers save the day????

Are you interested in joining such an event? It could be half or a full day (with different venues and operational tests). This is likely to be held in the summer (good weather, hopefully!).

For those with an interest in the history of crime, there will also be a London Crime walking tour in the evening, with our CEO, retired Scotland Yard DCI and published author, Mike Neville. See the original Scotland Yard, learn about the first cases involving fingerprints, Jack the Ripper and other infamous crimes. What a pity they didn’t have Super Recognisers in times of old!

Discounts will be offered to Association members for the exercise and the Crime tour.

Details of costs and timings to follow, but to register an interest, please email:

mike.neville@superrecognisersinternational.com

Super Recognisers - Starting in India

Super Recognisers Course - First time in India

Date and Time - The free introductory session will be held on 19th April (Monday) 2.00 to 3.00 PM (Indian time). OR 9.30pm to 10.30am (UK)

Who is a Super Recogniser? - Super recognisers are people with extraordinarily good facial recognition abilities. From spotting important customers to terror suspects/troublemakers in a crowd (rally, cricket match etc.), Super Recognisers can be very useful in various areas. For the police and defence forces, this would be a wonderful ability to develop and enhance.

Join Zoom Meeting - in partnership with Com-Sur Ltd
https://lnkd.in/emr7cEg

Meeting ID: 893 9135 0624
Passcode: 190421

Take this test - Here is an interesting test that determines whether a person can enhance his/her Super Recogniser abilities.

https://lnkd.in/ggRxeQE

Super Recognisers on BBC1 Frontline Fightback→

Professor Josh Davis and CEO Mike Neville feature on this episode of Frontline Fightback. It is available to those able to view BBC i-player. The section on SRs is approximately 29 minutes into the programme.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000tyny/frontline-fightback-series-1-episode-10

Latest SR Research - Mask Wearing Suspects→

New research by Professor Josh Davis and others has been conducted into the effect of subjects wearing masks and sunglasses on image matching. Once again, this demonstrates the importance of HUMAN Super Recognisers to law enforcement and security.

The effect of face masks and sunglasses on identity and expression recognition with super-recognizers and typical observers | Royal Society Open Science (royalsocietypublishing.org)

The abstract is below:

Face masks present a new challenge to face identification (here matching) and emotion recognition in Western cultures. Here, we present the results of three experiments that test the effect of masks, and also the effect of sunglasses (an occlusion that individuals tend to have more experienced with) on (i) familiar face matching, (ii) unfamiliar face matching and (iii) emotion categorization. Occlusion reduced accuracy in all three tasks, with most errors in the mask condition; however, there was little difference in performance for faces in masks compared with faces in sunglasses. Super-recognizers, people who are highly skilled at matching unconcealed faces, were impaired by occlusion, but at the group level, performed with higher accuracy than controls on all tasks. Results inform psychology theory with implications for everyday interactions, security and policing in a mask-wearing society.

Super Recognisers on BBC1 - Friday 9th April 2021

For those who can access BBC television, Super Recognisers will feature on the programme “Frontline Fightback” on Friday at 11am on BBC1.

French Super Recogniser article→

The latest research regarding Super Recogniser and voice recognition has been published in French. A translation is below. For the article see:

Ils excellent dans la reconnaissance des visages et des voix. Ce sont les « super-reconnaisseurs » (ampproject.org)

They excel at recognizing faces and voices. These are the "super-recognizers"

Are you good at recognizing faces? And the voices? Some people are very good and others have a hard time. Researchers have actually found a great variation in the ability of people to recognize the faces or voices of people who are completely unknown to them.

When it comes to face recognition, abilities vary between those who have difficulty recognizing the faces of friends and family - a condition known as "prosopagnosia" or face blindness - and those who have demonstrated exceptional skills in recognizing unfamiliar faces, called “super-recognizers” or “super-physiognomists”.

These super scouts are often hired by many detective agencies, and by the police. In London, they are said to do a quarter of the identifications on their own.

A similar aptitude could also exist for speech recognition. What is known at the moment is that some people have difficulty recognizing the voices of their friends and own family. This condition is called "phonagnosia". However, the question of whether a person can possess exceptionally good speech recognition ability has not been investigated so far.

In a new study, we tested whether super face recognizers could transfer their abilities to voice recognition, in order to explore the possibility that there are also super voice recognizers.

Two distinct capacities

In general, to assess the ability levels of super-recognizers, researchers often used two tests. First, the Cambridge face memory test measures the ability to observe and remember a face. Next, the Glasgow face matching test is used to measure the ability to tell whether two faces belong to the same person or to two different people.

However, just being good at recognizing a face does not necessarily mean that a person is also good at comparing faces. Research has shown that even super-recognizers can have very good face memory, but be on par with participants with “normal” face comparison abilities and vice versa.

Voice tests have also been designed, not to measure super-recognition abilities, but rather to measure the general ability to remember a voice, and to detect whether two voices belong to the same person or to two different people. . But how well can super-recognizers perform well on voice tests? This has not yet been reviewed.

Super voice recognizers

In our recent study, we tested four groups of participants, based on their ability to memorize and identify faces. Participants took a voice memory test, a voice match test, and a celebrity voice ID test.

The study showed that speech recognition ability varies considerably more than what is found in current literature, which describes people by classifying them into two categories: typical or phonagnosic. We found that some participants were very good at speech recognition, beyond typical abilities.

Second, we found that those with exceptional face memory skills, face matching, or both, outperformed those with typical memory and voice matching skills.

Some participants managed to achieve consistently high scores on multiple tests. This suggests the possibility that there are indeed some super voice recognizers. However, more research is needed to substantiate this possibility.

Part of the reason is that the voice tests used were never originally designed to distinguish exceptional from very good, and therefore may be unable to fully explore higher abilities. of voice recognition. Thus, new voice tests specifically designed to focus on the upper end of the spectrum of speech recognition capabilities are needed.

Mechanisms of the brain

Our research suggests that there may be a link between these abilities and different mechanisms in the brain. These could be mechanisms of intermodality (voice and faces) and intertask (memory and perception) which, working together, lead to this type of superior capacity for recognizing voices and faces.

It is possible that these people could be useful in positions similar to those of super face recognizers, such as police and security forces. This is particularly relevant when voice clips are the only evidence available, such as in cases of telephone surveillance, kidnapping, fraud, blackmail and counterterrorism operations.

Our research is the first to explore the potential abilities of voice super-recognizers and consider whether those with exceptional face memorization, face comparison, or both skills can transfer their skills to voice testing.

It gives a first lead suggesting that people with excellent voice recognition skills might be able to improve police and security operations. The screening of people with such abilities could be a useful tool during the recruitment stages for this type of occupation.

Latest Research - 3D Images Improve Performance of SRs

A new study by psychologists at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), University of Birmingham, University of Greenwich and University of New South Wales has found that the use of interactive rotating images could help to reduce errors in facial recognition scenarios such as border control, police investigations and passport processing and CCTV or video surveillance recognition and investigations.

See the full article:

New study finds that CCTV or video surveillance recognition is improved when using interactive images over statis | 2021-03-25 | Security Magazine