An Australian academic has abruptly departed the country for China after his work on developing technology to identify Uyghurs based on visual data was found to be unethical. Research conducted by Prof. Wanquan Liu at the University of Curtin in Western Australia and published in 2018 used artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to accurately identify whether an individual was Uyghur, Tibetan, or Korean. While face recognition technology has been developed and used globally, the ability to identify facial features of certain ethnic groups has not. Concern has been raised that the technology could be used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to further persecute the minority groups, with IPVM reporting police in China have since widely deployed Uyghur recognition technology supplied by China-based tech groups Huawei, Megvii, Dahua, and Hikvision. This comes as the CCP has received international criticism around the treatment of Uyghurs and Tibetans, along with the …