An Israeli police station in Sderot damaged during battles to dislodge Hamas militants who were stationed inside, on October 8 2023. (Photo by RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
When family members send in photos of their missing loved ones, Corsight AI’s technology checks for matches against images of patients.
With the death toll from the Hamas attack on Israeli towns near the Gaza border now over 1,000, and at least 2,700 Israelis wounded, victims have poured into local hospitals. Soroka Medical Center, located just east of Gaza in Beersheva, is now using facial recognition to help family members locate their missing loved ones.
The software is able to take an image of a person, including individuals whose features have been impacted by physical trauma, and find a match amongst photos sent in by concerned family members, according to Ofer Ronen, the executive vice president of global development at Corsight AI, which is providing the technology to the hospital for free.
According to Ronen, the company reached out to a doctor at Soroka who had put out a Facebook post saying the hospital had been flooded with calls from parents trying to find missing relatives. The hospital later opened a dedicated email account for families to voluntarily send their photos of missing loved ones so they could be checked against images of patients, Ronen told Forbes. “In a relatively short time, we were able to give peace to families,” he added.
Though Soroka Hospital hadn’t responded to a request for comment at the time of publication, Forbes confirmed with a hospital employee that the tech was in operation.
It’s not the first time facial recognition has been used to identify individuals injured or killed in wartime. Forbes reported last year that Ukraine was using software from controversial New York company Clearview AI to identify deceased Russian soldiers. The aim there, however, was to show relatives in Russia what Putin’s invasion had caused, forming part of Ukraine’s information war.
Corsight AI claims its technology is able to determine a person’s identity from a partial view of their face. Just as Covid was breaking out, in 2020, Corsight announced seed funding of $5 million, claiming it could identify someone behind a mask or protective goggles. It’s also claimed to be working on tech that can take a person’s DNA and create a digital image of their face to run through a facial recognition database, though experts have claimed that would be scientifically untenable, the MIT Technology Review reported last year.
Corsight AI had previously offered the same system to the Turkish government following the earthquake that killed 50,000 earlier this year, though in that case a different solution was chosen. After that disaster, local media reported that facial recognition helped reunite children who were unaccompanied at the time of the quake with their parents.
Founded in 2019, Corsight AI is a subsidiary of the Cortica Group, an artificial intelligence business founded in 2007. Corsight AI is backed by Toronto, Canada-based AWZ Ventures, a company that’s invested in a number of surveillance businesses and whose partners and advisors include former intelligence agents and politicians. Amongst them are former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, an AWZ partner, and former CIA director James Woolsey, a strategic advisor for the company.
Corsight’s leadership also includes former intelligence and security officials. Its chief privacy officer spent seven years as the surveillance camera commissioner for the U.K. Home Office. Its vice president of research was a cyber warfare officer for the Israeli Air Force.
