Review of ‘Defeating Face Liveness Detection by Building Virtual Models From Your Public Photos’ by Yi Xu, True Price, Jan-Michael Frahm, Fabian Monrose from the compsci department at Chapel Hill, NC.
As someone who works a lot with technology, the title of this post is a question that I keep encountering in life with unfailing regularity. Recent years has seen a growing role of technology in every aspect of business, even when the business is a non-technical one.
The world is a chaotic place at the moment, and it is rife with signs that we are nowhere close to the top of the curve when it comes to the chaos. My personal disappointments aside (I was hoping, rather naively, that with the major conflicts of the previous century out of the way, the world will change its attention to bettering the human condition everywhere), this is not something we had foreseen.
One of the most important changes in how software development happens these days is that developers also have to be reasonably competent at communication. The days where software development used to be an isolated/sheltered activity is going away and not being good at communicating yourself well will increasingly become a handicap for good developers.
The year was meant to be one that started with major change that were to happen, but it did not come together in the end. It was the year I felt most disconnected with the domains that I work in (media, healthcare, mobile) and it was also the year where I felt for the first time what it was like to be an old person in the working world.