Chinese tech giant Huawei may be freshly excluded from the UK’s 5G infrastructure on national security concerns but that hasn’t stopped its investment arm from snapping up a significant minority stake in one of Britain’s most prospective ‘spy’ start-ups. The 20% stake in Vision Semantics, reported on in the Sunday Times this weekend, was actually acquired between October 2018 and October 2019. But now takes on new significance against the back-drop of national security concerns Huawei has been flagged for.
Huawei Technologies Cooperatief is a tech investment spin-out from Huawei and has acquired stakes in a number of the UK’s most promising tech start-ups. But given the company’s suspected, though strenuously denied, ties to China’s administration, the nature of Vision Semantic’s area of business may give pause for thought. The company’s technology is designed to help identify individuals in crowds, using not only their face but also height, weight, what they are wearing and even objects being carried.
Vison Semantic was originally spun out of a research project of London’s Queen Mary University. Its ‘search and learn’ AI algorithms are, the start-up’s website claims, able to identify individuals from a crowd “even if there is no clear facial image or the lighting is poor or the person is partially occluded”.
The technology is, says Vision, already used by a number of police forces around the world. However, there are personal privacy concerns around the kinds of technology that the start-up continues to improve upon.
China has a record of mass surveillance of a different kind than is typically permitted in the UK and in other developed international democracies. It has been criticised for its use of CTV with artificial intelligence to track and control the Uighur population, and to hunt down and prosecute or intimidate protesters in Hong Kong.
Vision’s co-founder is Sean Gong, professor of visual computation at Queen Mary’s Institute of Applied Data Science. His academic work focuses on deep learning for large-scale video semantic search projects. Tracking individuals is most commonly the end use of such technology.
Huawei also holds a 1% stake in Bristol-based Graphcore. The £2 billion-valued start-up is developing AI-infused microchips it hopes will be used in Internet of Things (IoT) devices from driverless cars to connected home appliances, factories and next-generation urban infrastructure.
Huawei confirmed its ownership stakes in the two companies but insists they have not used them to gain access to the companies’ intellectual property:
“We can confirm that we have taken minority stakes in these businesses, but we are not using their technology in any Huawei products.”