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Facebook Buys Facial Recognition Firm Face.com: What It Wants With Your Face

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Facebook Buys Facial Recognition Firm Face.com: What It Wants With Your Face.

Facebook Facial Recognition Face Com

Prepare for Facebook to be a whole lot more in your face.

Facebook announced Monday that it will acquire facial recognition firm Face.com, an Israeli company that has worked with the social network for nearly two years to identify and tag people in uploaded photos.

Integrating Face.com’s facial recognition capabilities into Facebook marks an effort to encourage even more photo sharing on the social network and, further down the road, could yield new advertising opportunities or even features that bring facial recognition to the physical world, experts say. That extra convenience, tagging photos based on friends’ faces, whether on a smartphone or laptop, is also likely to bring a fresh round of privacy concerns over the limits of Facebook’s reach into its users’ lives.

“Today, facial recognition for Facebook is about photographs. But future uses of this technology could absolutely extend to recognizing people in the real world,” said Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps. “Facebook is becoming a search engine for people. It’s building a catalog of humans, and today that’s a two dimensional experience. Tomorrow it will take place in the physical world.”

Facebook declined to specify how it will integrate Face.com’s team and technology into its offerings. A spokeswoman for the social network told The Huffington Post in an email, “People who use Facebook enjoy sharing photos and memories with their friends, and Face.com’s technology has helped to provide the best photo experience. This transaction simply brings a world-class team and a long-time technology vendor in house.”

Face.com’s technology, which has been available to Facebook members since 2010, enhances the social network’s core strength: photos. Face.com’s facial recognition tools spare users the trouble of manually tagging friends in each image they upload, and instead scans the faces of people in photos to suggest names.

For Facebook, an uploaded photograph is good, but an uploaded photograph that’s been tagged is even better: It’s more likely to be seen by a greater number of people, and in turn helps Facebook provide the up-to-the-minute personal information that keeps users returning to the site. The visibility of photos depends on a user’s privacy settings, but generally speaking, if my friend Jason uploads a photo of me and doesn’t tag me in it, only Jason’s friends will be able to see the image. On the other hand, if Jason tags me in the picture, friends of mine who don’t know Jason will see the image of me in their News Feed.

But these tagging features aren’t yet as robust on Facebook’s mobile app, where U.S. users are spending more time accessing the social network and where tagging is even more labor-intensive. Experts say the acquisition will yield new tools that would make it simpler for members to tag their friends in photos — particularly those uploaded from mobile phones — and would ensure activity on the site stays high.

“The low-hanging fruit here is removing restrictions from photo uploads and enabling people to upload photos more quickly and make those photos more contextually relevant to their network and anyone depicted in those photos,” said Altimeter analyst Rebecca Lieb. “While it [facial recognition technology] definitely has desktop advantages, I see it largely as something to remove friction from mobile updates. Facebook is aggressively trying to move into mobile and improve consumer experience, while also monetizing it with ads.”

Face.com’s facial recognition capabilities might also eventually be used to tag objects or brands in photos, which could open up new sources of advertising revenue.

Forrester’s Epps notes that some companies are already using facial recognition technology to identify clothing in images posted online, and Facebook might wield Face.com’s technology to tag brands and retailers shown in users’ pictures. In 2011, Facebook gave users the ability to tag brands in their photos. That could evolve into a tool that automatically tags Coca-Cola cans or Levi’s jeans as a way of increasing visibility for Facebook advertisers.

“Facial recognition technology like Face.com’s is literally about faces. But that same kind of graphical analysis can be applied to anything,” Epps said. “Facebook will stay core to its people focus, but it could potentially branch out to shopping, for example.”

The social network could also use Face.com to help us find our friends. Facial recognition technology might be used to build an image-based search engine where users could search for each other with photos, rather than names, Lieb says. And in the long run, Facebook could even integrate facial recognition capabilities into wearable technology, enabling users to assume Terminator-like capabilities and identify people just by looking at them. Imagine being able to call up a stranger’s Facebook profile on your Google Glasses or Apple iSpecs as you shake hands for the first time. According to Epps, that kind of technology may not be too far off.

“We could see intelligent recognition where you don’t have to go to Facebook, but instead you have an app that follows you through the real world,” Epps said.

Facebook’s previous flirtations with facial recognition have been met with some resistance from users, and have drawn scrutiny from privacy advocates and regulators. After Facebook launched its “Tag Suggestions” last year, privacy officials in Europe launched an investigation into the feature and privacy groups in the U.S. filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

Apple and Google have integrated the technology into their own photo offerings, iPhoto and Picasa respectively, though doubts persist about the implications of facial recognition.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt said facial recognition was the one technology the web giant developed, then withheld.

“I’m very concerned personally about the union of mobile tracking and face recognition,” Schmidt told audiences at the All Things Digital conference in 2011.

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Jamaica’s Port Royal Seeks World Heritage Status

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Jamaica’s Port Royal Seeks World Heritage Status.

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Archaeologists said Tuesday that they’ll ask the United Nations’ cultural agency to bestow world heritage status on Port Royal, the mostly submerged remains of a historic Jamaican port known as the “wickedest city on Earth” more than three centuries ago.

Receiving the designation from UNESCO would place Port Royal in the company of global marvels such as Cambodia’s Angkor temple complex and India’s Taj Mahal.

The sunken 17th century city was once a bustling place where buccaneers including Henry Morgan docked in search of rum, women and boat repairs.

In recent days, international consultants have conducted painstaking surveys to mark the old city’s land and sea boundaries to apply for the world heritage designation by June 2014, said Dorrick Gray, a technical director with the Jamaican National Heritage Trust, a government agency responsible for preserving and developing the island’s cultural spots.

Port Royal was the main city of the British colony of Jamaica in the 17th century until an earthquake and tsunami submerged two-thirds of the settlement in 1692. It boasted a well-to-do population of roughly 7,000 at the time, and was comparable to Boston during the same period.

After the quake, the remainder of the town served as a British royal navy base for two centuries, even as it was periodically ravaged by fires and hurricanes.

In his sprawling book “Caribbean,” American author James Michener described Port Royal as having “no restraints of any kind, and the soldiers stationed in the fort seemed as undisciplined as the pirates who roared ashore to take over the place night after night. They were of all breeds, all with nefarious occupations.”

Now, it’s a depressed fishing village at the tip of a spit of land near Kingston’s airport. It has little to attract visitors except some restaurants offering seafood and a few dilapidated historic buildings. The sunken, algae-covered remnants of the city are in murky waters in an archaeological preserve closed to divers without a permit.

But in recent decades, underwater excavations have turned up artifacts including cannonballs, wine glasses, ornate pipes, pewter plates and ceramic plates dredged from the muck just offshore. The partial skeleton of a child was found in 1998.

At a Tuesday press conference, experts said it’s among the top British archaeological sites in the Western Hemisphere and should be protected for future generations.

“There is outstanding potential here. Submerged towns like this just do not exist anywhere else in the Americas,” said Robert Grenier, a Canadian underwater archaeologist who has worked closely with UNESCO. He believes the Jamaican site has a strong chance of getting on the world heritage list.

Texas A&M University nautical archaeologist Donny Hamilton said the consulting team has completed the fieldwork for the world heritage assessment and is working on a management plan. He said Port Royal could become a sustainable attraction for tourists but first “there’s got to be something above the ground that people are going to want to come and see.”

Jamaican officials and businessmen have announced various strategies to renovate the ramshackle town over the years, including plans for modern cruise liners and a Disney-style theme park featuring actors dressed as pirates.

Some area businessmen have grown exasperated with the slow pace of development.

“Somebody has to act with a certain measure of dispatch,” said Marvin D. Goodman, an architect with offices in Kingston, across the bay from Port Royal.

Wyoming delegation visits China province with much in common

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Wyoming delegation visits China province with much in common.

As a Wyoming delegation visits central China next week, it’ll spend time in Shaanxi province, a place with many similarities to Wyoming.

It’s not the food: Wyoming has top-notch steak, Shaanxi has gourmet noodles and dumplings.

Shaanxi is home to 37 million and is run by a centralized, socialist government. But, like Wyoming, Shaanxi is in its nation’s interior and is a major producer of fossil fuels — home to some of China’s biggest coal reserves and reservoirs of oil and natural gas.

Wyoming and Shaanxi find themselves working hard to find ways to limit or store greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal.

For Wyoming, such research is a chance to make sure the state’s coal will have buyers even amid stricter environmental regulations. For Shaanxi, similar research could open ways to limit the devastating levels of pollution in the province and in China from use of its natural resources.

Two very different places, but two coal-producing regions with some closely aligned goals.

“It’s so striking how similar they are with natural resources issues,” said Lynne Boomgaarden, a Cheyenne-based attorney on energy issues and a speaker at an international forum on coal.

Wyoming’s coal is pulled from the ground with few injuries and lives lost and shipped by rail. Shaanxi province isn’t so lucky. Coal is mined in sometimes deadly conditions by hand and trucked to China’s power-hungry industrial zones and growing urban areas. It’s an inefficient method that belches a lot of additional pollution into Shaanxi’s skies.

The province, which could produce 370 million tons of coal this year, is seeking a more environmentally friendly use of its coal resource, said a scientist from a university in Xi’an, Shaanxi’s capital, in a paper published this year in a Canadian scientific journal.

Shaanxi’s provincial government has said it’s seeking “wealthy people, graceful environment.” The Wyoming delegation will arrive in Xi’an for a coal forum aimed at the second half of that goal: cutting down pollution from coal and oil development, use and transportation in the province.

Shaanxi’s industrial users of coal must be asked to adopt “clean coal” technology to limit emissions, said Li Gou, of Xi’an University of Science and Technology’s Energy Economy and Management Research Center. Coal mines should adopt better production methods and the province should seek new uses for coal.

Only by doing all those things can Shaanxi “guarantee the sustainable development of economy,” Li wrote in the Jan. 1 edition of the Journal of Sustainable Development.

It’s a theme familiar in Wyoming, where state leaders and coal industry officials are also seeking new ways to cut emissions from burning coal and new ways to use Wyoming’s coal, boosting its value within the state.

The province government’s next five-year master plan, announced earlier this year, trumpeted the province’s success in cutting energy demand and called for more conservation of electricity, as well as cuts in pollutants including sulfur dioxide, holding the line in nitrogen oxide and strengthening monitoring of particulate matter.

The success of Shaanxi and Wyoming to limit pollution from the use of coal is something members of the Wyoming delegation recognize, even if they do it begrudgingly.

“At this point, they don’t probably care what anybody thinks,” said state Rep. Ed Buchanan, R-Torrington, speaker of the state House and a conference delegate. “But the more palatable you make burning coal to the international community, the more accepting they’ll be and the more you’ll be able to meet the demands of your population and industrial complex.”

Buchanan was referring to the Chinese, but it’s a thought many in Wyoming share.

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