Unrecognized

Finally got the uploader to work today, and uploaded about twenty more photos.  I wanted to test the system a bit, so I uploaded ten pictures of people that I’d already tagged and identified and ten pictures of people who were unknown.  I ended up with eleven pictures of people that Riya identified somehow, so I went in to check and see who had been mis-tagged.  Sure enough, a picture of my girlfriend’s sister had been tagged with my girlfriend’s name.  Does this mean that Riya will have a tough time telling the difference between family members?  I doubt it — I put up bunches of pictures of myself and my sisters and it was able to tell the difference between them every time.  This might have been a strange occurence, and a singular one at that.

Tara  has a post up asking for more ideas for the photosearch, so here’s your chance to get your voice heard!  Is there anything that YOU would personally like to see in a photosearch?  I like the idea of a location-based search, like finding all photos that were taken at a particular place I’m planning on taking a vacation to, or things like that, but it seems like Tara already has that idea nailed down.

Round Two

Had a great exhange with Munjal Shah today.  He responded personally to my critique of finding broken images in my email, and narrowed down the problem to Jeremy Is An Idiot.  I hadn’t turned off the image filtering in my Gmail, so all images from the Riya image server were showing up as broken, when in fact they were not — they were just being filtered out.  We still haven’t figured out why there were broken images on the actual Riya site itself for a brief time this afternoon, but it seems to be working fine now.

I’m loading a second batch of photos right now; or I should at least say I’m “trying” to load a second batch right now.  The uploader has been stuck on “Totals Photos Uploaded: 0″ for about twenty minutes.  Might it have something to do with the fact that I tried to upload photos from a location outside of my pictures folder?  I doubt that’s it, but it’s the only thing I changed as far as I know.

I will say that the software has done an incredible job recognizing the people that ARE in my photos, especially given the minimal amount of training I have given it thus far.

[alpha 1] Beginning thoughts…

I uploaded a pretty large set of photos to the RIya alpha. They say it works better if you have 1,000 photos, but I don’t have that many stored on my computer right now, so I uploaded everything I could. The process took about 45 minutes, and then the server emailed me at my registered account to let me know it was done uploading. It’s supposed to show you a list of faces that the software has recognized that need tagging, but all I got was broken image links. I expect quite a bit of that; Tara made sure to let all of us testers know that the software was in “soalphaithurts” phase, but also stressed the importance of leaving feedback for the team so they can grow out of these rough spots.

I logged in to the software and started adding tags to faces. It instantly grouped together five of my pictures of Abbey, mostly because those were the shots with the best frontal picture. Riya definitely works better when the subject is facing towards the camera, but it *does* work in other situations too. It instantly made me about ten more groups of people, and I spent 10 minutes tagging everyone. The software is amazingly easy to use and runs quite smooth on my Firefox-assisted laptop here. Granted, I’ve got a cable modem all to myself, but this thing is humming along quite nicely.

After naming all my Riya-recognized people, I went through and started manually tagging people. While you’re doing this, the software is still “learning” people and their faces, so it might go ahead of you and recognize someone that you would have otherwise had to tag manually.

I’m going to download all my Flickr photos and add them to Riya tonight at some point. Right now, I’m duly impressed with what I’ve seen, even with the broken image links.

Tags: Riya, Photosearch, riyarocks

Alpha is out

The initial Riya alpha release is now out.  I’m installing the uploader on my machine and will then start uploading all my photos; I hope to have some more thoughts about the system later tonight.

Riya’s Worth

I’ve been doing some thinking about what a service like Riya could potentially be worth to companies like Google, Yahoo or even Microsoft.  Most of us have heard the rumors that Google is offering to buy out Riya for $40 million, and that seems like an astronomical number.  It’s just a rumor, of course, so please don’t take my words as anything but that.  If you stop and think about it, though, you start to realize that to someone like Microsoft, Riya could be worth a whole lot more.  The possibilities of including Riya’s technology in Windows Vista boggles the mind; can you imagine having facial recognition software right out of the box?  I’d wager that the real price of Riya, if they do sell the property eventually, will be somewhere above $200 million, and that’s a bare minimum.  We could see a bidding war escalate, especially if Google decides that THEY would like to include something like Riya in this oft-rumored web-based OS they’re supposedly buildilng.

Thank you to all the folks from Riya who’ve linked me from the official Riya blog and your personal blogs.  I hope it comes through that I’m a geniune fan and can’t wait to try this software out!

Riya Conversations

I got an email from Tara Hunt, the superbly great “mischief marketer” from Riya.  Tara said she’s crossing her fingers for the alpha invites to go out on Monday, so if you’re on the list you should get your invite.  Personally, I can’t wait!  Danny Yang (also of Riya) also wrote me to tell me they’ll be launching shortly, so stay tuned.

Enric from Tech Alley sent me the link to a video he shot at the TechCrunch meetup/Riya Launch Party in which Tara gives a demonstration of the software.  I gotta admit, it looks pretty freaking cool in action; all I’d seen up to this point was screenshots, but now that I’ve seen it in action I’m even more impressed.

Attention Methods

Robert Scoble has a post from November 19 detailing the TechCrunch/Riya launch party. In it, he details a conversation he had with Ojos CEO Munjal Shah. Munjal talked about the facial recognition technology that has us all salivating, but he also revealed something I did not know: that Riya also uses other characteristics to identify certain people in photographs. Scoble’s son was wearing a tie-die shirt that night, and Riya would have stored information about that shirt so that it could better recognize him in case a photo doesn’t have a clear shot of his face.

Now, I’m wondering how well this is going to work in practice. Thousands of people have tie-die shirts, so will it return all those people? I guess it would be cool to say “show me all pictures of people wearing Houston Rocket jerseys” and have Riya return that, but I’m talking more specifically about finding a single person. Do you have to drill down through a bunch of data to find who you are looking for, or does the software match up shirts and other attention details with facial characteristics to give you a closer match?

This is a question I’m hoping to answer whenever the alpha goes out.

Take the Riya tour

Riya has a service available on their website that acts as a tour guide to some of the major features of the software. It takes you through the steps of uploading, tagging, and searching photos, but the real revelation here is the revealing of the auto-tagging feature.  If you add your address book to Riya, you’ll be able to automatically find pictures of people that are in your contacts list — so long as they’ve been tagged by someone else.  This essentially means that I could upload a picture of myself, train Riya to recognize that it’s me, and then tag it with my email address.  Then if my mom or someone like that goes to Riya and uploads a picture of me, it’ll automatically tag it with my name since Riya knows that it’s already me.  Pretty crazy, huh?

I truly believe that this is a software package that will reach an even bigger audience than Flickr.  Why?  Because people who don’t use Flickr will be attracted to this because of the ease of use. I’m not saying Flickr is hard, but being able to find people via facial recognition will revolutionize the picture hosting and photo search industry simply because it’s intuitive and easy. I know people who don’t know anything about Flickr, but when I mention Riya to them and tell them what it can do, they get excited.  It’s truly the future of photo search, and Google better truly be thinking about snatching this company up before Yahoo does.

Riya Alpha nearing ready state

In checking up on the various Riya employee blogs, it looks as though the next wave of alpha testing is about to begin.  Ojos (the company developing Riya) had planned on sending out invites to 1,000 testers (myself included) on November 23, but are still working out a few kinks and bugs in the system before passing it on to the public.  The team even worked through the Thanksgiving holiday, which shows enormous dedication and belief in the product they’re creating.

I’m eagerly anticipating the release of Riya, and I haven’t even tried it out yet.  I’ve always wanted to see what facial recognition software could do, and the fact that they are releasing it to the masses for free is both astonishing and highly effective.  If the software works as planned, then Riya will have no problem owning the photo search market — especially if they can get to it play well with Flickr.