Facial Recognition Technology -- Emerging After Decades of Development -- Draws Lawsuits and Proposed Bans  We sometimes forget that not all of the technical wizards who transformed our world were young “geniuses” jacked up on Starbucks, their shirttails hanging out in the ping-pong section of their open concept offices. Woody Bledsoe was born 99 years ago. As a young son of a sharecropper he demonstrated exceptional mathematical capabilities. Early in his career he had a dream: A machine that could think like a human, converse like one, and even recognize faces. This was as far back as the 1950s. This mathematician and computer scientist would go on to teach for decades at the University of Austin where he worked to advance automated reasoning and artificial intelligence. But what was his role in the development of the technology exactly? Did he perform work for a CIA front? And why, in [...]