On Wednesday, Tinder announced that it is rolling out a mandatory facial verification tool for new users in the US to help combat the spread of fake profiles and weed out “bad actors.”

Tinder claims its mandatory facial integration feature, called Face Check, is a first for a major dating app. During the sign-up process, new members complete a “liveness check” by taking a short video selfie within the app. The procedure collects and stores an encrypted map of information about the shape of the user’s face. “We don’t store a picture of your face, it’s not photo recognition, it’s data points about the shape of your face that are turned into a mathematical hash,” says Yoel Roth, head of Trust and Safety for Match Group, which owns Tinder. Tinder then uses that “hash” to check whether a new sign-up matches an account that already exists on Tinder.

Face Check is currently available to users in California, which will be followed by Texas and other states.

In a news release, Roth said the measure “sets a new benchmark for trust and safety across the dating industry” and “it helps tackle one of the hardest problems online, knowing whether someone is real … while adding meaningful obstacles that are difficult for bad actors to circumvent.”

The company defines “bad actors” as accounts that engage in deceptive behavior, including spamming, scamming, and bots. Currently 98 percent of the content moderation actions on Tinder address fake accounts, scamming, and spam. “There is a significant volume of the overall trust and safety work we do on Tinder that is focused on this challenge.”

Roth says it is a “meaningful improvement in our ability to address scaled abuse. You can get new phone numbers, new email addresses, new devices, you can’t really get a new face.”

The company is aware that asking new members to scan their faces might be seen as a privacy issue, but “theoretically, if somebody were to get access to every single one of these hashes that’s been created, there isn’t really anything they could do.”

The app’s previous verification methods were voluntary. Members, depending on their jurisdiction, could opt to verify their profiles through a selfie or ID process. Other dating apps like Bumble also use facial recognition software to let daters verify their authenticity, but on a voluntary basis.

When asked what the app plans to do about the fake profiles that already exist, given Face Check applies only to new users, Roth says the tech is most effective in curbing “the biggest issue that we’re concerned with, which is the bulk creation of new accounts.”

A team of UBC Okanagan students has shown that recycling rubble from destroyed buildings can help Ukraine rebuild its roads when the war eventually ends.

As part of their year-end capstone project, six School of Engineering students worked on an initiative called “Rebuilding Ukraine.” They partnered with Dr. Kate Woodman and Iryna Storozhuk, the founding members of Okanagan 4 Ukraine, and four Ukrainian engineers to test the idea of using rubble from destroyed buildings to rebuild roads.

Dr. Woodman reached out to numerous Canadian universities and organizations—including the Canada-Ukraine Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Embassy in Ukraine, the Canadian Ukrainian Foundation and Engineers without Borders—to find groups willing to help the country.

“Of the more than 25 engineering faculties I wrote to, many said this was a new idea—finding ways to support a country during an active war,” says Dr. Woodman. “I’m glad the UBCO team took it on. This project shows how Canadian universities can contribute to humanitarian engineering and post-conflict resilience while giving students valuable international experience.”

The six students—Alexa Hum, Alexander Marcuzzi, Arman Hajiabdolmajid, Hans Nicolajsen Suarez, Jacques Aritanto and Yugandher Ghugare—worked with faculty advisors Drs. Dimitry Sediako, Jonathan Holzman, Suliman Gargoum and Gordon Lovegrove. They explored using the ruins of buildings to create the right type of concrete strong enough to rebuild the road network.

Arman Hajiabdolmajid, who is finishing his studies at UBCO this year, explains that the team designed a strong, reliable concrete mix that can be used as a solid and reliable road surface to rebuild the country’s existing but heavily damaged transportation infrastructure.

“Due to the ongoing war, there are large amounts of waste material in the form of rubble and debris, and if not put to use, will end up in landfills and eventually overwhelm the country’s waste system,” says Hajiabdolmajid. “By recycling the concrete rubble as a replacement for aggregate, a major component in concrete, we can put this rubble to good use rather than discarding it.”

He adds that recycling rubble also helps reduce the need to extract the traditional fine and coarse aggregate from riverbeds and quarries, as the recycled concrete proves to be a suitable substitution.

“As rebuilding begins, demand for materials will increase, potentially depleting local reserves. This could lead to costly imports as substitutes,” he adds. “And the country’s waste system is not designed to process the amount of waste material produced from this war.”

A typical concrete mix consists of cement, fine aggregate or sand, gravel or coarse aggregate, water and additives that enhance the final product. To reuse rubble from Ukraine, the debris must be crushed into fine sand. This involves gathering and transporting the damaged concrete to a processing site where materials like metal, plastic, glass and wood are removed and disposed of properly.

In the UBCO lab, the students gathered concrete waste from past experiments to create a solution that included the highest volume of recycled fine aggregate while still meeting strength requirements. They used compression testing to monitor the concrete’s strength after seven, 14 and 28 days.

Although concrete roads are not common in Ukraine, the team chose concrete over asphalt because it has a longer lifespan. Reusing rubble also supports some United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and makes the mix more environmentally friendly. The students created a sustainable, high-performance concrete using 30% recycled aggregate. It passed lab testing at UBCO and exceeded benchmarks required for European road infrastructure. To complete the project, they also created a prototype sensor to detect internal concrete cracks or instability.

Dr. Jonathan Holzman, an electrical engineering professor, says this innovative approach helps solve resource scarcity and sustainability problems.

“Our capstone projects give students hands-on, real-world experiences before they even graduate. Working with the Okanagan 4 Ukraine team and engineers in Ukraine gave these students the opportunity to make a difference in a country that will—hopefully, one day soon—begin the path to reconstruction.”