
Facebook is convinced this man is his mother - denzil_correa
http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/10/6126027/facebook-is-convinced-this-man-is-his-mother-deep-face
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xnull
We had this exact same thing happen when we bought funeral services for my
(late) older brother. They asked us for a bunch of pictures of him and some of
his favorite music to use in a slideshow they were preparing as part of the
funeral package.

We have everyone at the service, in the pews and settled in. The lights dim, a
projector screen rolls down and music starts to play. His music. Their
slideshow was not exactly a slideshow, but an automatically generated
remembrance DVD. It started with a flyover of some nature/rambling rivers and
then rose into the air into parting clouds.

So far so good.

The DVD was an interspersing of stock nature footage and pictures of my
brother. Face recognition algorithms were used to find where he was in each
picture and slowly 'zoom' into them, or pan over to center on him. I think
basically so that there was some sort of movement to the pictures.

But their software (or more likely the software they had licensed) hadn't
gotten his face right. Instead it kept zooming in on family members and
(tragically) cutting him out. Instead it zoomed in constantly on my sister. It
was obvious that either the software didn't have a way to correct such errors,
or that the funeral home hadn't bothered to preview the DVD before making it a
part of the service.

~~~
jewel
I work on slideshow creation software for funeral homes. Stories like yours
are something I worry quite a bit about, since we've found that once users
trust our software, they stop bothering with the preview.

We let the user choose custom zoom points but don't yet incorporate face
recognition. As far as I am aware, none of our competitors have face
recognition or even face detection.

Some funeral homes hire or outsource to a local videographer instead of using
purpose-built software. It's possible that the videographer could have used a
slideshow plugin with that feature and then combined it with the stock
footage.

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IvyMike
Facebook is racist against fat bald guys with beards and assumes we all look
the same, because it's always suggesting I'm one of the other random fat bald
guy with a beard I know.

(Actually, after going through a lot of bogus suggestions over the course of a
few months and correcting them, it's a lot better. But the joke doesn't work
as well this way.)

~~~
skrebbel
What does being fat, bald and bearded have to do with race?

~~~
keerthiko
Semantics; clearly he meant "discriminatory towards". But you know, "being
racist against" has kind of been accepted to have essentially the same meaning
colloquially.

You know what he meant :)

~~~
darrhiggs
>> You know what he meant :)

How can you say this? I certainly didn't; colloquialisms are often
geographical in nature.[0]

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquialism#Examples](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquialism#Examples)

~~~
keerthiko
If you want to argue, way to cite a flagged Wikipedia section, for not having
any citations and "possible original research," and also being exactly just
that one sentence long with no added explanation.

I'm from south India/grew up in the middle east/studied on the east
coast/worked on the west coast of the US, lived in Singapore and Thailand
briefly. And there are definitely some colloquial usages that are fairly
universal. In my experience this is one of them.

Please also note appended smiley face. Obviously not everyone is familiar with
every colloquialism. It's too bad if you were confused by the implied meaning
of "racist against", and if my clarification of its colloquial usage was
insufficient for you, but i find your comment adding very little value here.

~~~
bitJericho
You're just being racist against him.

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blueflow
This is also related to one of my greatest fears, when such algorithmic
results are (mis)used for prosecution or other legal stuff.

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bagels
This is likely caused by the age difference, and the fact that they probably
have some overlapping friends, even if it's not just one another. I'd have to
guess the way it works is that Facebook looks at the poster, the poster's
friends, and maybe the poster's friends of friends for a decent match among
them when it encounters an untagged person. He probably scored higher because
he does look like her, and those pictures are quite old and lack features that
his mother currently has, such as wrinkles.

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laoba
The same thing happens with my daughter: periodically Facebook thinks she is
my wife or myself.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Same here. But then again, my wife and I do sometimes tag photos of our
children with each others name to draw attention to a picture posted when the
other is not there. (I'm not sure I explained that clearly but I see people do
this a lot so I assume everyone knows what I'm talking about.) I would imagine
that confuses FB's algorithm a bit as well.

~~~
electromagnetic
Yeah definitely. I get tagged in photos of my son, because he's my son and
it's normally one of the grandparents taking the picture when we left him with
them for the night. Our family Christmas party must destroy the algorithm when
everyone who attended (50+ people normally) get group tagged into every
picture.

I do not doubt Facebook is running into problems because humans have a
3-dimensional perspective of time and events. It's the classic "why isn't
mommy in any photos with us dad?" because she took them! Dad remembers, he was
there. He's not seeing the photographs perspective, he's seeing his own
perspective standing with his kids looking at his wife. To him his wife is in
that photo even though she is visibly absent.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Facebooks algorithm is spooky. Early on my son labeled his cousin as "Dad's
brother's daughter". Later that week it had changed magically to 'cousin'.

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ejain
I'd be more intrigued if a service like 23andMe made such a claim...

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Just yesterday there was a story on HN about 23andMe where a guy discovered he
had a half brother but 23andMe tagged him has potentially his grandfather.

~~~
madcaptenor
Both of those pairs would share one-fourth of their genes; how would 23andMe
be able to tell them apart, other than looking at their ages?

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rglovejoy
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies)

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sebastianavina
It's going to be interesting how all this technology finds an use and abuse in
the long term

