Do I know you?

I'm terrible with names, especially if we've only met a few times, maybe only yearly at trade shows.

This is a real problem when you're on the sales campaign trail - so what do you do? Make it a feature! So expanding on the vision technology that we've developed I created a fun little recognition app.

I ask the meeting to look at my camera, I take a snap shot of the meeting room. I then run the app, in real time. The app uses the vision technology to detect the faces, it extracts each face. I then give the app the name of the company, and using the LinkedIn API, it goes in and gets the profile pictures and looks for faces. It then goes through each one, and tries to recognise the known face from LinkedIn to the faces in the room. It's not very efficient- but the recognition routine runs in parallel - using all cores.

The accuracy rate is not very high; it is only using a single image to train the recogniser, some companies are very large, and that single image from peoples LinkedIn account - well - people don't always look exactly like their picture. You know who you are! However, normally, by the end of the meeting it has recognised one or two people.

It is a little bit fun. The app, written in Python, has a 'futuristic' interface and it is a provocative and interesting way to introduce the technology, its potential and open up the discussion.

Maybe that is why Microsoft brought LinkedIn.....