Microsoft can guess your age with its facial-recognition technology

You know what people never really think about: age. That’s why no one ever lies about it, or buys wrinkle cream, or surgically alters themselves. So it makes sense that Microsoft was “shocked” when an age-guessing tool it put online went viral. Who would have thought that people would be into something like that?? Corom Thompson and Santosh Balasubramanian are engineers in Microsoft’s Information Management and Machine Learning division. They created How-Old.net to test out new face-detection APIs Microsoft recently released. Users can come to the site and watch it guess the age of people in photos. So who do you think people (Internet users) are going to want to test the algorithm with? If you’re thinking random people from stock images … that’s what the researchers thought, too! “We assumed that folks would not want to upload their own pictures but would prefer to select from pre-canned images such as what they found online,” the researchers wrote in a blog post. “But what we found out was that over half the pictures analyzed were of people who had uploaded their own images.”