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Microsoft's AI Judges Age From Snapshots, With Mixed Results
mikejuk writes: A Microsoft Research project that lets users upload photos and estimates their age and gender has attracted more attention than expected — not all of it complimentary. The How-Old.net site demonstrates of some of the capabilities of the Face API included in Microsoft's Project Oxford that was announced at Build. It may have been expected to be a source of amusement but instead it backfired when people started to upload their own photos and discovered just how wrong its estimates could be. It demonstrates not only that machine learning has a long way to go before it's good at estimating age, but also that machine learning may not be the most politically correct way to go about answering the question 'How Old Do I look'. It might be better to employ and algorithm that built in all the rules of how to make a polite answer to that request — such as always knock a decade off the age of anyone over 28. Perhaps this particular neural network needs to learn some social skills before pronouncing how old people look. However it is capable of telling some truths — a photo of Barak Obama in 2005 gives an estimated age of 46, close to his real age of 44, but just 9 years later in 2014 the age guessing robot places him at 65. It seems that Mr President aged 20 years in less than 10 years of office.
It's probably more accurate to say that Presidents look haggard and appear to be older than they are while in office. Probably something to do with the responsibility and the stress. Thing is in this Microsoft software, if it doesn't have a means to address the difference then it probably will err on the side of older.
Someone did a faces of pornography shoot where they took headshots of pornographic actresses before and after their makeup was applied. I wonder how substantial the differences there would be with the subject at the same age.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
DoILookFatInThisDress.com
AmIPregantOrJustFat.com
ShouldIWearSpadex.com (well you can build that one but only if it always returns NO for all input)
HighlightLinesOnMyFace.com
UsePhotosFromThisFacebookFeedToPhotoshopSomeoneCheatingOnSO.com
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