DeepGestalt is a face-recognition software that identifies rare genetic disorders evidenced as imperceptible facial alterations (think Down Syndrome but imperceptible). What's cool about this is that it uses your phenome, not your genome.
This is cool because it's totally non-invasive; you don't need genetic material like blood. It's scary because you don't need genetic material to get genetic data about the people you're looking at; I'm thinking surveillance here.
The software was developed by a company called FDNA, and trained on their own database of 500,000 faces (from 10,000 people). Facebook has the biggest face database there is, but this comes in at #2.
And if you're a monkey and feeling left out, don't fret, we're coming for you too. In a shift of species, pictures of cute chimps are being used to train a system that crawls social media posts looking for matches of missing monkeys. (People who buy trafficked monkeys do publicize it, because why else would you want a monkey if not to show your Friends.) It's called ChimpFace, and it's definitely not the only animal-face-rec software out there; elephants, lemurs, lions and pets in general.
So it seems like deep learning and face-recognition are a dynamic duo. But face-rec can be anything-rec. It's pattern recognition. Orgasm recognition? The sound of a fake orgasm? Anything.
Notes:
AI can diagnose some genetic disorders using photos of faces
Jan 2019, Ars Technica
Facial recognition tool tackles illegal chimp trade
Jan 2019, BBC News
