Riya Beta

I just got my email about registering for the Riya beta.

Don’t know what Riya is?

Basically some next generation face recognition software that will eventually provide a more efficient and effective way of searching and indexing photographs (that’s my take on it, it may or may not jive with Riya’s true mission)

My first impression is that it’s sort of flickr’ish.  There is a desktop uploader (written in Java) that allows you to select and upload your images.  Once uploaded, you manually train the recognition on your image set using a fairly intuitive (and simple for the time being) web interface.
The manual training asks you for a full name and email address for each recognized face, I haven’t looked farther but I wonder if it supports training across users (ie. I say someone looks like Adam Jordens (my.email@address.com) and someone else says the same thing, is the software smart enough to know its the same person).

Eventually I’m guessing it would be, but for the time being, Riya is as smart as a 2-year old.  It’s up to us to upload content and help the training progress.  I encourage you all to get in on the beta and give it a shot.  I’ll write a follow-up post in a few days once I’ve had time to upload more images and better test the system.