The United States has blacklisted several Chinese AI companies working in facial recognition and surveillance. Why? What are these companies doing exactly, and how does this fit into the international politics of AI? We dig into these questions and attempt to do some live fact finding in this episode.Sponsors:DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean now offers three managed databases — PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis. Get started for free with a $50 credit. Learn more at do.co/changelog. The Brave Browser – Browse the web up to 8x faster than Chrome and Safari, block ads and trackers by default, and reward your favorite creators with the built-in Basic Attention Token. Download Brave for free and give tipping a try right here on changelog.com. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in “re-education camps”Surge in Chinese research related to surveillance of Muslim minoritiesUS AI Blacklist summary article from MIT Technology ReviewHikvision Their websiteHere’s what you need to know about Hikvision, the camera maker behind China’s mass surveillance systemChina’s Hikvision Has Probably Filmed YouiFlytek Their websiteWhy 500 Million People in China Are Talking to This AIMegvii Their websiteBehind the Rise of China’s Facial-Recognition GiantsMegvii, the Chinese startup unicorn known for facial recognition tech, files to go public in Hong KongYitu Their websiteAI Startup Yitu Seeks IPO on China’s New Tech BoardThis Chinese facial recognition start-up can identify a person in secondsLearning resources:TensorFlow 2.0 notebookUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!