None Shall Be Nameless and Faceless
"I couldn't shake the feeling that I had potentially walked past a photo of a family member without even knowing it.""I'm the grandson of Holocaust survivors, all from Poland."Danial Patt, Google employee, creator of website N2N (From Numbers to Names)
An
engineer has created software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to
identify anonymous Holocaust victims in World War II photos. Photo EPA |
"She believed [Geddy Lee's grandmother] that if they [her family] were all going to perish, they would perish together, and if they were all going to survive, they would survive together."Geddy Lee, Rush rocker
Privacy
rights activists, academics specializing in ethics concerns and human
rights and specialists involved in the technology industry have all
expressed concerns over artificial intelligence and face recognition
technology and with good reason. Beijing for example, gives ample reason
for unease over its broad, universal use of face recognition to keep
tabs on its citizens and to gain information on their political
orientation and activities deemed to be injurious to state interests.
But
like any technological breakthroughs and scientific discoveries there
are positive applications and there is the potential for negative use of
new knowledge. And while Beijing uses face recognition to keep its
population in line with its state-ideological oversight, a new
application for facial recognition has been pioneered by a Google
software engineer, Danial Patt, who was inspired to create the website From Numbers to Names.
Here, the facial recognition facility is powered by AI analyzing
photographs of Holocaust survivors to match them with headshots provided
by website users.
"We reached out to Geddy Lee, from Rush, with a photo we thought was of his mother. He was able to confirm this was indeed a photo of her at the displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen.""Geddy was then able to subsequently discover photos of his grandmother, uncles, an aunt and other extended family by browsing the Yad Vashem [Israel] collection where the initial photo came from."Daniel Patt, creator of N2N
Geddy
Lee's mother, Mary Weinrib, survived Auschwitz, as a Holocaust
survivor, and arrived as a refugee with her husband Morris Weinrib to
Canada in 1946. She spoke of her Auschwitz experiences with her
children, according to Lee. When a photo was discovered showing Mary
Weinrib at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in northwestern Germany
Danial Patt contacted Lee.
Born
in Warsaw in 1925, Manya (Malka) Rubinstein who later became Mary
Weinrib at marriage, was sent with her family to a labour camp in
Starachowice, then later relocated to Auschwitz, and finally
Bergen-Belsen, somehow surviving her ordeal. On a visit to the POLIN
Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Patt was inspired to work on a
project in his spare time with his personal resources, that would
eventually become the Numbers to Names website.
There
is now a team of engineers and researchers working on the project with
Patt who aspires to partner with museums, schools, research institutions
and other groups to raise awareness of the Holocaust. The website can
be freely accessed and has analyzed over 500,000 photographs with
roughly two million faces. The hope is that eventually 700,000
additional photos dating before and during the Holocaust will be
accessed.
The
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) uses the technology
now. Its immense collection of a database exceeding 270,000 registered
survivors with over 85,000 historical photographs represents an asset
allowing the museum to access another one million photographs. The one
constraining issue to completely identifying the vast number of people
who passed through the gates of Hell in the Final Solution, is ebbing
time.
Currently there is no single list identifying the victims and survivors of the Holocaust (Picture: EPA/www.auschwitz.org) |
"[There is so much interest in the N2N website] there is a backlog of potential identifications we're manually going through now.""We have been developing the project over the course of evenings and weekends over many months. There's an urgency to this effort as the last remaining survivors pass, and there are many connections that could still be made."“We simply show results, with similarity scores, and let individuals decide whether the results contain a positive identification,”"We hope that N2N can help build those connections while the survivors are still with us."Danial Patt, creator of N2N
Patt says that his team makes no software-based assertions about the
accuracy of the identification, leaving that judgment to the people
using the site. Peta Pixel |
Labels: Artificial Intelligence, Facial Recognition, Holocaust Victims, Identification, Survivors, Virtual Reunion
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