
I’ve Just Seen a (DNA-Generated) Face - pepys
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/dna-generated-faces.html
======
dogma1138
Quite interesting however the portraits really have almost no resemblance to
the subjects.

Yeah they look kinda "similar" but virtually every facial feature other than
base racial feature is incorrect. All of the renderings attempt to pretty much
render a racially correct "grey face" which can pretty much fit almost anyone.

Everything else from the shape and position of the eyes, nose bridge,
cheekbones, lips etc. doesn't match the real photographs.

I really hope that this doesn't reach law enforcement because those sketches
will fit every "average" person in their respective racial group, and it even
seem to get the ethnic group wrong in at least 1 out of the 3 renderings...

~~~
heurist
Agreed. It seems like nutrition, illness/disease, and random developmental
quirks would all drastically affect the actual shape of a human's face between
birth and adulthood. You might be able to predict a range of faces to account
for these differences, I guess, but then you have a broad range of faces that
might match a broad range of people...

~~~
kyberias
WHAT? No! Have you forgotten the fact that identical twins actually
look...well, identical? Face features clearly have a very very very very high
heritability.

~~~
excuse-me-sir
Twins share the same environment in the 1st 9 months, when their faces are
formed.

~~~
kyberias
Usually yes but that doesn't change the fact that face features are highly
hereditary. I find it very hard to believe that someone could try to deny
this. It's basic biology really.

What are you suggesting here exactly? What exactly is the environmental
trigger in the womb that forms the faces if not genes?

May I kindly remind you about the concept of dizygotic twins, that is, twins
that share the womb but do not share an identical genome. Please explain why
they don't look identical.

~~~
heurist
I'm not saying faces aren't determined by hereditary factors, only that there
are also other factors. Almost all of the 'identical' twins I've seen had
subtle differences.

~~~
kyberias
Yet those differences are, as you said, subtle, that is, very small. That
means that, in the context of this article, there is no huge range of faces we
can determine from genes, but the genes (when we know them) actually determine
the face very very precisely as proved by identical-twin-resemblance. The
predicted faces in the article are fuzzy not because environment has a great
impact but because our knowledge of the genes that form our faces is still
very limited.

~~~
heurist
The differences between twins who grew up together and were exposed to the
same environmental effects were subtle, not necessarily so for the difference
between a person and a prediction based on their genome. The comparisons of
predictions to real faces from the article showed that (so far) predicted
faces miss tons of little details that make people recognizable. Genes do not
work in a vacuum, different environmental factors can trigger the use of
different genes, and many genes are expressed to varying degrees depending on
chance. Say one twin grows up in a nutrient-rich environment while another
grows up in a nutrient-poor environment. The nutrient-poor twin will most
likely have more developmental issues than the nutrient-rich twin, which can
have a wide variety of effects. Perhaps a model trained on more data would be
more accurate, but I'll believe it when I see it.

~~~
kyberias
Clearly you're unable to calibrate your stubborn beliefs with the fact that
two identical genomes produce identical looking people. That is VERY strong
evidence that a person's face is almost 100% determined by genes. Stop hand-
waving and study more developmental biology.

~~~
heurist
I'm certainly stubborn, but I'm not the only stubborn one here. Unless you're
a biologist I probably know at least as much about genetics as you, so we're
working from the same level of knowledge. Look up epigenetics. The real world
is not as perfect as textbooks and experiments like to pretend. Additionally,
I happen to think a lot about adaptive systems (obsessive levels of thought
sometimes) so the idea that systems develop differently when exposed to
different stimuli or environments is a given to me. Check this out:
[http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/one-twin-
exercises-...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/04/one-twin-exercises-
the-other-doesnt/?_r=0) They took identical twins who had already grown to
adulthood together and analyzed differences between the sibling who exercised
a lot and the one who didn't. Guess what: they found differences that a
genetic analysis would not predict! It's trivial in my mind that two identical
twins who grew up in very different environments would look noticeably
different due to developmental differences. I don't even know what you're
arguing over, I never said faces are not genetically determined, only that
other things also affect it. That would be the reason for that "almost" part
of your assertion. I'm saying that difference is not negligible, some people
look very similar by chance.

A quick search led me to this:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2011/12/26/144282436/th...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2011/12/26/144282436/the-
photographic-fascination-with-twins) Close, but not identical.

------
orta
This happened to me, an artist took the DNA from my github and created my face
back in 2013. Cool stuff.

[https://github.com/orta/dna](https://github.com/orta/dna)

~~~
jessedhillon
Do you have a photo of your face in roughly the same pose for comparison?
Also, why does the nose look so faceted?

------
rl3
Imagine people with stunted growth or disfigurement as a result of non-genetic
circumstance, using a more accurate form of this technology to see what they
would have looked like otherwise.

Profoundly sad to think about.

On the other hand, one possible use for such renderings could be to guide
reconstructive medical procedures.

------
jqm
Environment plays a large role in facial appearance. Weight, diet, habitual
emotional expressions, facial hair, to say nothing of acne, injuries, facial
exercises (for the muscles in the face) or reconstructive surgery.

Maybe they could divine how close the eyes are or how big the nose is... but
even that doesn't seem terribly accurate from these picture. I suppose the
technique will get better soon enough, but I doubt anything approaching
publicly recognizable accuracy will be achieved by this method alone.

~~~
crimsonalucard
The inaccuracy can't be solely attributed to environment. Many identical twins
who share identical DNA that are separated at birth still share remarkably
similar facial features. If two faces generated by identical strands of DNA in
the real world remain identical, despite being grown in different environments
then an accurate simulation of DNA should reproduce an accurate face
regardless of environment.

The inaccuracy arrives from the black box statistical process they use to
generate the face. They don't know the full story behind how billions of
strands of DNA can scaffold a physical face made out of billions of cells,
nerves and blood vessels.

Instead they just measure a bunch of faces relate it back to certain known
attributes in the DNA and then generate a face. This process will always be
inaccurate. In short they treat the system like a black box and build a
simulation of the black box by only establishing correlations between input
and output.

Imagine if some alien race used this type of process in attempt to analyze the
linux operating system running on a computer. They measure the electrical
output of each pixel in the monitor and they find statistical correlations
between pixel configurations in the monitor and the arrangement of bits in the
cpu register. Using this process the Aliens can only gain a very flawed
understanding of what's actually happening.

------
pimlottc
Silly me, I thought everybody's face was DNA-generated...

------
grandalf
Those are the results with a training set of 7000, I imagine it would get
spookily accurate with a 50K training set.

~~~
dvanduzer
Where'd you get that number?

~~~
grandalf
Just a guess. The faces were pretty close but for a few angles here and there.

~~~
dvanduzer
I couldn't figure out what a training set of any size would even mean. Taking
X number of DNA sequences paired with real photographs, and then extrapolating
to DNA sequences without a photograph? That might do something interesting if
someone tried it, but I don't think it's that kind of technique at all.

------
hackuser
There's another story about the technology's accuracy and its application in
law enforcement, here:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/building-face-
and-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/building-face-and-a-case-
on-dna.html)

------
personjerry
I've been waiting to see something like this, it's very neat (if somewhat
unrefined).

Now apply OldBooth and we'll be able to see what our babies will look like.
Brave New World here we come!

~~~
sparaker
I think it will need another 5 years of development before we can get even
near that.

------
ap22213
I wanted to do something similar last year, but I figured that I'd need a lot
of input data to classify on facial features. Where do people get the input
data?

~~~
TaylorAlexander
The article notes that they used data from 23andme, a commercial DNA profiling
service that is $100.

------
balabaster
My gut reaction to this was so what we've all seen DNA generated faces our
whole lives... and nobody finds that in any way remarkable...

~~~
TaylorAlexander
The old way took tens of years and a couple hundred thousands of dollars in
food and board. Plus there is no way in nature to take a DNA sample left at a
crime scene and turn that into a rendering of a face.

Now it can be done with $100 worth of DNA analysis and a few minutes of
compute time.

