Microsoft sets up machine learning demo site that guesses your age

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Joab Jackson, U.S. Correspondent, IDG News Service reports, "Its purpose is to convince developers that machine learning algorithms are easy to use."

To demonstrate the new machine learning capabilities in its Azure cloud, Microsoft has set up a Web site that guesses the ages of people in uploaded photos.

how-old.net

The site, How Old Do I Look, is meant to show how easy it is for developers to use machine learning algorithms to make predictions and spot trends, said Joseph Sirosh, Microsoft corporate vice president in the company’s cloud and enterprise group.

The site, which he unveiled on Thursday at Microsoft’s Build 2015 developer conference in San Francisco, asks the user to upload a picture with someone’s face. After a minute or two, it will return a guess for how old the person in the photo is.

Thursday’s demo at Build was designed to familiarize developers with how machine learning could be used, and embedded into applications. Sirosh used a picture of a family whose members ranged in age from the teens to the early 70s. The service was able to predict their ages fairly closely, he said. The service can even guess the age of people depicted in paintings. It calculated the Mona Lisa’s age as 23, which was about the age of the model in the Leonardo da Vinci painting.
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Source: ITworld