Working on this project made me super excited and curious about the new design possibilities that are going to open up as the technology improves. Working on a variety of web apps, I've gotten used to the practice of designing a content-agnostic post container that can work with anything (any type of mood, any type of subject matter) a user would post.
As we move into a world where image content can be reliably identified (and natural language processing being able to extract similar info from text posts), there is going to be an opportunity to tailor those post units more to the content. Like editorial design in a magazine, but at the scale of user-generated content that has been classified by deep learning algorithms. I see Pictograph as a foot in the door of those possibilities and I'm excited to see what things look like when that door is fully open.
Products that derive "meaning" from UGC/social network data are interesting. Life on Twitter is one of my recent favorites. That said, mine's not super accurate:
@rrhoover Ryan, awesome that you shared yours! We had two motivations for making this -- the first is to give people some insight into their photos, and the second was to show how deep learning image analysis works (or doesn't). We talk about that bit over here: http://www.pictograph.us/#/how
There is so much about this project that is amazing. The core premise that computers can categorize sight, which can be argued is the primary data collection tool humans use to make sense of the world, is mind blowing and we have just hit the tip of the iceberg of what Machine Learning can do.
But what I find really amazing is that this project was built, not by an army of engineers at Google but by a team at Fast Forward Labs small enough to fit into a studio apartment.
Finally, while breakthroughs in technology used to be about increasing human productivity and creating a bicycle of the mind, it has more recently been about transporting or feeding or washing the clothes of the 1%. These kinds of projects show that the human-computer partnership is alive and well and we are right around the corner from world changing technology tools again.
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Implications are awesome. I can't wait to layer into photo memory project I'm working on!
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