As Western academic institutions re-evaluate their ties with China in the face of the mass detention of around one million Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang, one leading U.S. scientist is facing criticism for giving a keynote speech at the country’s largest conference for biometrics.

As revealed by Coda Story last month, Anil K. Jain, the head of Michigan State University’s Biometrics Research Group, traveled to Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi in August 2018 and gave a speech about facial recognition at the Chinese Conference on Biometrics Recognition (CCBR). Jain was also on the CCBR’s advisory board and was pictured receiving an honorary certificate. 

Jain is regarded as one of the world’s most influential computer scientists and a pioneer in areas of pattern recognition and biometric recognition systems. He has won countless awards and honors and is often quoted on U.S. facial recognition issues in publications like Wired and Slate. In the same month as Jain presented a paper titled “From the Edge of Biometrics: What’s Next?” at the CCBR conference in Urumqi, a United Nations human rights panel described Xinjiang as resembling a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.” 

Biometrics played a prominent role in the government-led “anti-terror” crackdown which saw hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs detained in re-education camps. Facial recognition, DNA collection, iris scans, and other methods of surveillance became ubiquitous.