Tech lead for Amazon Rekognition digital identity at billion-level annual scale.
I am the tech lead for digital identity verification on Amazon Rekognition, defending billion-level annual identity checks against presentation attacks, deepfakes, and injection attacks. The program ships multiple model updates per year to track new threat vectors, and I designed the proactive challenge-response paradigm at its core.
The technical risk that shaped the program: keeping false-positive rates flat for legitimate users while attackers shift from physical spoofs to GenAI deepfakes, a continuous-distribution-shift problem. That problem is what motivated the lifelong-learning research direction. Production constraints become research questions.
Research artifacts: design principles for remote anti-spoofing systems (Xu et al., 2024). Production artifacts include patents on liveness from motion/face/context (Xu et al., 2025), mobile device user authorization (Xu et al., 2025), and gesture/expression/concurrency validation (Zhang et al., 2025), with synthetic-image evaluation of biometric authorization (Xu et al., 2024) as the testing methodology.
References
2025
Patent
Liveness Detection Based on Motion, Face, and Context Cues
Xiang Xu, Mingze Xu, Zheng Zhang, and 4 more authors
@misc{xu2025liveness,title={Liveness Detection Based on Motion, Face, and Context Cues},author={Xu, Xiang and Xu, Mingze and Zhang, Zheng and Xiong, Yuanjun and Xia, Wei and Wu, Jonathan and Tighe, Joseph},year={2025},note={US Patent 12,300,035 B1},}
Patent
Mobile Device User Authorization System
Xiang Xu, Tianchen Zhao, Jon Wu, and 1 more author
@misc{xu2025mobile,title={Mobile Device User Authorization System},author={Xu, Xiang and Zhao, Tianchen and Wu, Jon and Tighe, Joseph P.},year={2025},note={US Patent 12,418,526 B1},}
Patent
Liveness Detection Based on Gesture Validation, Facial Expression Analysis, and Concurrency Validation
Zheng Zhang, Xiang Xu, Hao Chen, and 2 more authors
@misc{zhang2025liveness,title={Liveness Detection Based on Gesture Validation, Facial Expression Analysis, and Concurrency Validation},author={Zhang, Zheng and Xu, Xiang and Chen, Hao and Wu, Jonathan and Tighe, Joseph P.},year={2025},note={US Patent 12,333,863},}
2024
arXiv
Principles of Designing Robust Remote Face Anti-Spoofing Systems
Xiang Xu, Tianchen Zhao, Zheng Zhang, and 4 more authors
@article{xu2024principles,title={Principles of Designing Robust Remote Face Anti-Spoofing Systems},author={Xu, Xiang and Zhao, Tianchen and Zhang, Zheng and Li, Zhihua and Wu, Jon and Achille, Alessandro and Srivastava, Mani},journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.03684},year={2024},}
Patent
Evaluating Biometric Authorization Systems with Synthesized Images
Xiang Xu, Hao Zhou, Jonathan Wu, and 1 more author
@misc{xu2024evaluating,title={Evaluating Biometric Authorization Systems with Synthesized Images},author={Xu, Xiang and Zhou, Hao and Wu, Jonathan and Tighe, Joseph P.},year={2024},note={US Patent 12,039,027},}