Prof. Dr. Meike Ramon
“Human Natural Identity and Deepfake Processing – Insights from Super-Recognizers and Law Enforcement”

Prof. Dr. Meike Ramon

Recent technological advances and related societal issues have led to a surge of both attention towards and misconceptions around the concept of “face recognition”. The arguably most important facet of face recognition — identity processing — is neither a solved, nor easy problem. On the contrary, it is a typically underestimated, highly complex skill that our brains have developed to efficiently master. Generative AI and the ability to create synthetic identities at scale have given rise to entirely novel questions in this field of facial identity processing research. Using examples of ongoing and future work in my group, I argue that studying cognitive and biological mechanisms of human face identity processing can advance our understanding of brain-behavior relationships and hence the development of efficient biologically inspired automatic solutions. Moreover, it can support the development of human-machine interactions and facilitate an inter-stakeholder exchange necessary to maintain trust in institutions, and enable innovative research opportunities. Creative approaches to using synthetic identities in particular can play a major role in enhancing trust, privacy, and fairness across a range of applications.