Daniel Patt, a 40-year-old software engineer now working for Google, has developed a facial-recognition software that cam scan photos from prewar Europe and the Holocaust and identify the faces in the pictures.
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This is hugely beneficial to help people alive today identify relatives and see them in old photos.
As reported by Times of Israel, “From Numbers to Names” (N2N) is an AI driven facial recognition platform.
Mr. Patt feels a deep personal connection to this amazing project. Three of his four grandparents are Holocaust survivors. He uses the software to help his own grandmother find photos of her family members murdered by the Nazis.
She was just 9 years old when the war started and she fled with her father and siblings, while her mother stayed back. Her mother was shot and killed during the Nazi invasion of Poland, and Mr. Patt’s great-uncle was killed when he returned to rescue her.
The software has searched through hundreds of thousands of photos to identify faces for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) as well as individual survivors and descendants.
Mr. Patt said, “I started this project after visiting the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland, in 2016. 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. The museum is filled with walls of photos of survivors and victims — but there were only a handful of names to go with them. I was haunted by the possibility that he was passing the faces of his own relatives without even knowing it.”
When asked to describe one of his success stories, Daniel said, “We reached out to Geddy Lee, from [music band] 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 collection where the initial photo came from.”
For individuals who want to use the site, all they have to do is upload a photo from roughly the same time period. The software returns the 10 best potential matches that it can find in the database available to it.
Incredible my wife a first generation will now be able to
See grand parents she was denied the right to know by an uncaring world. Yes Jewish blood was and still is cheap