Dr. David W. Jacobs is a former visiting scholar at FAS and a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland with a joint appointment in the University’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He received a PhD from MIT and then conducted research at the NEC Research Institute, until he joined the CS department at the University of Maryland. Dr. Jacobs has worked in many areas of computer vision and machine learning.
He has served as an Associate Editor of IEEE PAMI, an Area Editor for Computer Vision and Image Understanding, and as Program co-Chair for CVPR. He and his co-authors received honorable mention for the best paper award at CVPR 2000. He also co-authored a paper that received the best student paper award at UIST 2003, and he and his co-authors received the best paper award in Eurographics 2016. Dr. Jacobs and his collaborators have been awarded the 2011 Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Technology Pioneer Award for the development of Leafsnap, an app for tree species identification that has been downloaded over 1.5 million times and widely used in education and biodiversity studies.
These ideas aim to advance the detailed policy solutions needed to foster public trust and implement fairness in the adoption of AI across diverse domains, from healthcare and government benefits to rural access, education, and worker protections.
With thoughtful policy action, it is still possible to build systems that are fair, transparent, and accountable, and to earn the public trust that will ultimately determine AI’s future. We hope policymakers are ready to act.
As of March 2026, there were at least nine documented U.S. wrongful arrests tied to face recognition misidentification. Errors like these are as much human as machine.
Even as companies and countries race to adopt AI, the U.S. lacks the capacity to fully characterize the behavior and risks of AI systems and ensure leadership across the AI stack. This gap has direct consequences for Commerce’s core missions.