A website and an AI to help identify Holocaust victims


A New York engineer has developed an online tool to search for relatives among archival photographs of the Holocaust. A philanthropic project carried out alongside his work at Google.

Daniel Patt, a 40-year-old software engineer working for Google, had a great idea in 2016 while visiting the Polin Museum in Warsaw. Built on the former Warsaw ghetto, the museum is dedicated to the history of the city’s Polish Jews, many of whom were deported to extermination camps. Passing in front of photos of survivors and victims of the Holocaust, Daniel Patt got it into his head to build a tool based on facial recognition in order to help identify the people appearing in the images.

As reported Times of Israel, he created and developed a site called From Numbers to Names (N2N), which functions globally as a PimEyes-style facial recognition platform, based on artificial intelligence. The tool can scour databases of photos from pre-war Europe and the Holocaust and link them to people living today. The engineer was particularly sensitive to this theme, members of his family having passed through the death camps.

A free, non-profit site

The site therefore offers to download a photograph, and refers to the 10 best potential matches that it can find in the database at its disposal. Daniel Patt points out that the tool works best with old photographs, and that the tool leaves the interpretation of the results up to the user. The software was used to search hundreds of thousands of photos to identify faces for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington.

Developed by Patt solo in his spare time, the tool quickly gained notoriety. Its creator was joined by other enthusiasts: engineers, data scientists, researchers… “The cost of providing quick search results increases as we analyze more photos and now historical videosexplains the engineer. We are about to launch an offline search experience that also allows users to get their search results in a day, instead of seconds, to reduce costs. We also have fiscal sponsorship with A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds to help cover costs.”.



Source link -98