A software engineer has created an artificial intelligence whose objective is to help the descendants of Holocaust victims to identify them in period photographs, and find them in case they are still alive.
Google native David Patt came up with the idea in 2016 when he saw the countless photographs of Holocaust victims at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. He explains that he was haunted by the possibility of meeting the faces of his own family without even knowing it.
More than 700,000 photographs available
The AI developed by Patt in his spare time is called From Numbers To Names (N2N) and is available free of charge to anyone who wishes to use it. Powered by facial recognition technology, it is able to sift through more than 700,000 photos of pre-war Europe and the Holocaust, and link them to people alive today. Visuals were provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
“ People who come to the site can click on “select an image”. They can then select a file on their computer or phone containing the cropped photo of a single face. They can then click on the “search” button, which will show them 10 photos containing the most similar faces to the one provided by the user. The software works best when searching for photos from around the same time (e.g. before the 1960s) “, explains David Patt in an interview granted to the Times of Israel.
If the results are not guaranteed to be 100% reliable, N2N has nevertheless allowed people to formally identify photographs of their grandparents, parents, aunts or uncles. This is a real feat and a highlight, as there is no single list identifying Holocaust victims and survivors, according to the USHMM.
A ” vehicle for teaching the Holocaust »
David Patt, three of whose four grandparents are Holocaust survivors, has been joined by accompanying engineers, researchers and data scientists to grow the project. ” In the future, we would like N2N to become a vehicle for teaching about the Holocaust, giving students the opportunity to contribute directly to the historical archive. Students can use the software to help identify faces and artifacts in photo and video archives and potentially uncover new connections between living Holocaust descendants and their ancestors “, he explains.
The engineer warns, however, that time is running out to find relatives, while the survivors are becoming fewer and fewer: ” This effort is urgent, as the last survivors are dying, and many connections could still be made. We hope N2N can help make these connections while survivors are still with us. “, he concludes.
This artificial intelligence is a good example of the countless possibilities offered by new technologies in many fields, and particularly history.
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Sources: The Times of Israel, Mashable
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