My Heritage – Family and Genealogy

At Techuncut Mash Up, I was talking to my friend, Richard Giles about family history…shortly after I got an email asking me to check out a cool "face recogition" tool that matched your picture (in this case Richard's) with a celebrity. Using the face recognition technology tool, it gives you a percentage score of how close the celebrity looks like you based on the facial features in the photo. I won't tell you what was the result. I'll let you go there, upload your own photo and check it out for yourself…

Aside from a cool gimmick, My Heritage has some serious family history capabilities, whilst the functionality is not live, the beta center has info…

Explaining how it works very clearly…

MyHeritage.com automatically learns from every new face it is taught, so after a few examples it will recognize all your family and friends. It can be set to auto-tag faces recognized in high probability.

Associating faces with family trees is great fun. After doing so your family and children can click any face in any photo to see all photos of that person, or the family tree of that person, or their own family relationship with that person.

MyHeritage.com has sophisticated algorithms that facilitate the use of face recognition for genealogy: it recognizes faces in different stages of peoples' lives and uses additional photo meta-data such as dates and places to improve the accuracy of face recognition.

What it offers to provide…

MyHeritage.com builds up a worldwide repository of faces with a special focus on historic photos and genealogy.

You can search for your ancestors in photos submitted by all other MyHeritage users. Who knows what you might find: an unknown photo of your grandfather in his youth? The childhood friends of your great-grandmother? Discover people who look just like you on the other side of their planet. Your lost family relatives? Perhaps!

I will be amazed if this can really happen. It seems to me that finding an unknown photo of your grandfather to be a long shot, a very long shot…but I will find it fun, looking for people that look like me, unless they are a male version look-a-like.

Listen to the CEO, Gil Japhet of My Heritage and find out more…being interviewed by the host of The Gadget Show, Richard Giles from the Podcast Network, click here