Twitter was abuzz today with people posting photos and laughing about the results from Microsoft’s new face-detection website.
The How Old? website (which Microsoft took down in the past few years and never set up a redirect) allows you to upload a photo, and based on an algorithm, guesses the gender and age of any faces recognized in the photo.
Created in one day by Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian, engineers in Information Management and Machine Learning at Microsoft, the two were exploring an API for face detection and recognition.
Yesterday, the two sent an email message to a few hundred people, expecting about 50 people to try out the How Old? website.
The response was overwhelming. Within a few hours, over 35,000 people had tried it out.
Today, Twitter was filled with #HowOld tweets and photos from people who tried out the website. Some results were spot on, others were far off.
I tested it out using my Twitter portrait, and was surprised when it guessed my age at 24 years old.
The algorithm has some work do to in estimating my age; I have a college-aged son.
At least it guessed my gender correctly.
Learn more about the how old process and their work.
