Face.com is here presenting helping you code using our API. We’re even giving out an iPad2 for best use of our API! Come check out our presentation at 5:30pm. Also, just let us know you’re hacking for TC and we’ll provide you with unlimited calls. Check out our developer page to find out more info on using the Face.com API, and contact us with the email you used to sign up if you need to unlimit your account.
TechCrunch had this to say about this weekend’s Hackathon:
“The fourth annual TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is just around the corner! Spend an intense 24 hours hacking, learning and presenting with the Bay Area’s finest developers.On Sunday morning, you’ll have a chance to demo your hack in front of hundreds of audience members. Our group of select judges will choose several teams to present their hacks on Wednesday in the Hackathon Highlights from 2:30pm – 4pm.”
Look for us and maybe we’ll even give you a shiny new extra special Face.com sticker…or a t-shirt. You’re worth it.
What a weekend! PhotoHackDay was an amazing success with over 370 registered attendees and 42 hack submissions. Of those, at least 1/3 were using the Face.com API. We placed strong and celebrated afterward with an After-Hack Party @ SPiN. Check out the Winners, Demo’s and Party:
Winners:
1st Place – Photobot (used Face.com API) – Won $5K and will be featured on the Nasdaq Times Square electronic billboard.
2nd Place – HoneyBadger (used Face.com API) – Won $2,500
3rd Place – Nostalgia – Won $1,000
People’s Choice – HoneyBadger – Won $1,500
Demo’s
Here’s a long, but amazing list of all the submissions using the Face.com API. Here we go:
PhotoBot – A photo quality suggestion engine. Simply take a photo and their Photobot tells you how your photo can be better. Suggestions often include: Take photo from a different angle, over exposure, subject not smiling, and many more.
HoneyBadger – “A robust, motion detector security system for your computer.” It enables your computer to know who’s looking at the screen. If it’s not the primary user, sends out a text alerting the owner.
Emotional Breakdown - Shows the emotional state of the world by analyzing emotions of people in news stories.
Facialytics - Get the emotion of a crowd by using our API to get the reaction of an audience. Track audience reaction over time. Perfect for movie screenings and tv pilots.
HappyMug - Get pictures of your friends all smiling – put it on cool items…like a mug. Wake up to all your friends smiling at you. ”Like a party in your cupboard!”
Stash Your ‘Stache – They firmly believe that every man with a mustache would look better without it. StashYourStache shaves it off for you.
Moodify - App takes picture of your face and determines your mood. Then (based on your mood) Moodify suggests a list of songs you should listen to on Spotify.
Friendpocalypse - Uses Face.com and Facebook to turn pics of your friends into zombies. Then you can kill them. “Unfriend the undead.”
Underwear-Model-ify Yourself via MMS - Text photos to (917) 678-7382. You’re sexier than you know it. Just wait for the response.
Instagirl - iOS app creating a stream of non-stop hot girls. Simple…Brilliant.
Photobombr - Turn your photo into a meme. Photobomb some peeps! Just tweet your photo and include #photobombr. Look for reply.
TrueLookALikes - Which of your Facebook friends look like which TrueBlood characters? Find out!
(Sorry! No video yet…)
Beard me - They love facial hair, and believe that you should too. Try out different styles, share with friends and get their feedback. Start now by showing your beardless mug.
Party!
After a hugely successful Demo Day, Face.com continued the party at SPiN Galactic on 48 E 23rd Street. Much beer was drank and ping pong played. Pics on our FB Page!
Hi from PhotoHackDay NYC! The turnout is ridiculous and dozens of developers are hard at work creating applications using the Face.com API. Grand Prize winner of the event gets their app featured on NASDAQ. Best use of our API gets an iPad2.
In New York, there’s nothing you can’t do. Your app featured on NASDAQ in Times Square will inspire you.
Face.com is right in the middle of this weekend’s PhotoHackDay NYC. We’re jetting in, sponsoring (aka making it rain), presenting, holding an API workshop and giving a prize for best use of our API. Plus…winner of the best application will get featured in Times Square on the NASDAQ electronic billboard. I know…holy free, amazing publicity Batman! Sign up while you still can!
We’re pretty damn excited and you should be too. We’ve demanded asked our staff to be on call for the occasion so they will be providing real-time support. Here’s how you can get our attention:
We’ll be there so you can also just walk up to us and politely ask for help. Depending on how much beer we’ve had, we can probably help out. No guarantees though.
We’re proud to be supporting Aviary and PhotoHackDay. Watching the magic happen always gives us satisfaction. See you in Midtown…
Face.com is coast-to-coast this weekend, sponsoring hackathons in NYC & SF.
Starting tonight at 6pm EST, Startup Weekend NYC focuses on building web and mobile applications and brings together developers, UX/UI designers and business folk all with the goal of building apps with a commercial use case. No one’s discounting hacking for hacking’s sake, but these guys are serious. They’re hoping to create applications that have legs, commercial legs. Completed apps will be shown at Sunday’s Demo Day. Don’t worry, tickets are still available.
The San Francisco HAPI hackathon kicks off tomorrow at 10am. HAPI Hack Weekend is a hackathon focused on leveraging APIs to create cool new software. Naturally, we had to sponsor because a) we have an API and b) we empower the creation of new and cool.
We’re here to help all developers and have set up IRC channel #face.com on freenode to provide real-time support. Since our team is in Israel, here are our real-time support hours:
New York (All times EST)
Friday: Until 7pm
Saturday: 1am > 7pm
Sunday: 1am > 7pm
San Francisco (All times PST)
Saturday: 9am – 4pm; 10pm – 12am
Sunday: 12am – 4pm
You can always email us at support@face.com. I’m sure one of our insomnia and caffeine ridden professionals will get back to you shortly. Good luck and ping us with any* questions or comments.
*Criticism will be met with hostility and general mockery.
X=Likelihood of making a false match; Y=Likelihood of answering (Click to Enlarge)
Face.com is working around the clock to develop accurate and powerful face recognition technology. In our latest achievement, we’ve boosted our technology and recognition performance by approximately 30%.
We’re committed to improving face recognition technology and have published our findings in order to allow researchers from around the world to leverage our hard work for their own internal research. Therefore, we are sharing this news with the research community first, presenting preliminary metrics and visualizations at face.com/research.
We’re proud of our major improvements:
Error rates have been reduced by approximately 30%
At zero false positives (errors), we have almost doubled the best recall rate (results) to date
Many more high-confidence recognitions than before – not just saying who it is, but saying it with high confidence
Able to more accurately recognize despite aging, pose, expression and illumination factors
As part of our research, we’ve tested our new and improved algorithm with the UMass Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark, which is the de-facto standard test bed for unconstrained (in the wild so to speak) face recognition. We achieved a mean accuracy (average score) on the test set of 91.3% +/- 0.3. This is the best result reported to date. Many thanks for their support and making the results public.
To better explain the results, the graph (right) represents the trade-off between false-positives & true-positives (ROC curve). Interestingly, much of the improvement is achieved at the high-valued performance range – where at low false-positive rates the recall has almost doubled the best results reported to date. Trust us when we say: This is a good thing.
Our new and 30% improved algorithm will be available soon. Visit our research page at face.com/research to learn more and let us know how we can help your research by emailing us at research@face.com.
Now that over 20,000 developers are using our APIs, we wanted to create a little something extra to keep everyone in the loop. Now developers (and anyone else for that matter) can sign up to receive the Face.com Developer Newsletter. Each edition will include new features, tricks and tools that you can use in your app.
Our inaugural newsletter introduced…wait for it…Moods & Facial Expressions! Needless to day, we’re very excited as this new set of facial analysis attributes allows you to estimate moods and key facial expressions. To try these new attributes, just pass our API a photo for face detection, and there’s no need to pass any personal user identifiers. Some interesting use cases include selecting ”best” photos for display, measuring reactions on live chats, photo search filters, dating preferences and competitions.
It’s been only a few days since the release of these new features and we’ve already seen some impressive applications like this one called “Moodbattle” where you compete for who has the angriest, happiest, saddest or neutral(ist?) facial expression. Create something cool* and we’ll even send you a Face.com T-shirt. Yes, you’re welcome.
Feedback is always welcome and we look forward to seeing those API calls spike through the roof.
The Face.com Team
*Definitions of ‘cool’ may vary from individual to individual, location to location and country to country. Void where prohibited by law which is uncool.
For those of you who loved Who Framed Roger Rabbit, here’s your chance to be a Toon in Toontown. The Tides Group recently released the latest version of their Android App “Cartoonizer Free.” With over 10K downloads, it’s pretty fantastic. Cartoonizer is a photo edition tool that provides users with the capabilities to cartoonize their photos. What does it mean to ‘Cartoonzie’ a photo you say? Well, Cartoonizer uses the Face.com Face Recognition API to detect and recognize the position of the facial features of the person in the photo, and then it automatically adds the features to a cartoon image. Voila!
Face.com’s API is so powerful and accurate that it provides information on gender, head rotation in the 3 axis, whether the person is smiling, and if the individual is wearing glasses. The Cartoonizer Free app uses all this information to automate the process of cartoonizing photos. Once this cartoonization process is complete, the user can also add more features to the photo and edit all the facial features. For example, the user can edit the hue, contrast, brightness and saturation of each element, and make it match with the skin color of the person in the photo. Imagine if your bugged out Roger Rabbit-like eyes weren’t the proper shade of red and white? Not a problem with Cartoonizer. Cartoonizer is now available in the Android Market. For you, it’s free.
Thanks to Sebastian Pereyro and the The Tides Group team for demonstrating what’s possible with the Face.com API.
Recently Facebook announced their new face recognition capability was being deployed network-wide. Many news organizations picked up this story and explored the ramifications.
A recent TechCrunch article focused closely on the technology and benefits involved in using the new face recognition features. O’Reilly Radar also elaborated on how the technology is a great tool to alert people on your friend list that you might have appeared in a photo. The result means better data for the entire network in the aggregate. Another recent Forbes article also expounded on the benefits and even went so far as to explain how easy it is to change your privacy settings and disallow auto-tagging if face recognition isn’t your cup of tea.
ABC’s Nightline investigated these new features by calling on CEO Gil Hirsch to elaborate on some of the more technologically innovative and interesting aspects of face recognition. Check out the full episode here and watch the interview below.
This weekend’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hack Day in NYC saw new ideas come to life including a Face Recognition program developed by Nigel DeFreitas and Team that is a real-time personalization system. Leveraging the Face.com API, their project takes a photo of a consumer at a point of sale and then uses a recommendation engine to offer that person products and provide other useful commercial data. Once a person opts into the service, the app recognizes your face and tells you what you might want to buy based on your FB profile and then figures out what you like based on information gathered.
According to one blog, Face.com’s API shined and was in wide use during the Hackathon this weekend. Thank you to everyone who took us up on our offer of unlimited API calls. Glad we could help.
Staying up all night while eating nothing but pizza and RedBull definitely paid off. Congratulations Nigel on getting your creation covered by ZDNet and let us know how we can help in the future. That goes for all developers: Like Nigel’s Team and the others who used our Face Recognition API, we’re here to help and work with you on any new endeavors.
