[Genealogy-SIG] GENEALOGY NEWS 20061001

[jotaito]

Genealogy SIG Meeting:  5 Oct 2006, Thursday 
Place:  DMA Conference Room
Time:  7 PM

IS THIS GENEALOGY? 

Well, no!  What I am about to share with you is not, strictly speaking, genealogy.  But it is another example of how computers can be adapted to complement almost any hobby.  And, I can see where some folks will be quite entertained by the results.  

Recently, the Dayton Daily News (Monday, 7 Aug 2006, p. D16) carried an article by Jake Coyle describing a new capability on the MyHeritage.com website (an Israel-based site).  The suggestion is to use a picture of yourself and see what celebrities you resemble most via a facial recognition algorithm of some sort.    

While I am very leery of posting pictures of myself on the internet for a lot of reasons, I did take a picture and test the system to see the results of the comparison.  Should you decide to take My Heritage up on its "free" offer, be advised that after you enter the picture and run the program, you will have to register yourself on the site in order to see the results.  This program is a facial recognition program that compares some basic facial characteristics from your picture with those in a database of celebrities (i.e. if you choose to make the comparison to their entries in their celebrities database). 

My results (and they are returned in rank order) indicated that my male subject had characteristics most similar to eight different women (actresses) and only two men (actors).   This was a little surprising at first; but after thinking about it I decided that it could happen.  Gender would not necessarily be reflected in feature measurements of a face.  I also tried using a hand-drawn caricature of another person and the system rejected it entirely.  Anyway, it was an interesting experiment and started me thinking about how else it might be used.

Is this really genealogy?  Well, not in the traditional sense; but with such technology developments, I can just see some genealogists with lots of family pictures (and time on their hands) using some type of facial recognition algorithm sorting family characteristics among family members.  Similar studies are being made using DNA. Not quite the same but who knows what the next fad will be?

See you at the meeting!

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jotaito