I teach data mining here at the Tepper School, and one example I use of something that is hard to get computers to do is to recognize faces, a task any 2 month old baby can do reasonably well (at least with regards to mothers). But it seems that MyHeritage.com has this licked: given a photo, they do a great job of seeing who your celebrity look-alikes are. And for me, it was uncanny. I can’t tell you the number of times I have walked down the street and have people say “Aren’t you Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?” That’s assuming they are not mistaking me for the Dalai Lama. I am glad I now have this picture so I can clear up any confusion: that is me in the upper left; Kareem is in the lower left. Perhaps the easiest way to distinguish is to note that I still have some hair on the top of my head. Or perhaps that Kareem is the taller.
Check out the face recognition at http://www.myheritage.com/face-recognition
I’m now hard at work to create the algorithm to prove my real look-alike is George Clooney.
I didn’t get George Clooney, but I got Richard Gere, which is also decent. But my top match was Winston Churchill: http://moya.bus.miami.edu/~tallys/celebrity
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I always knew I was pretty, and now I have confirmation. I got Angelina Jolie as one of my matches!