Having migrated to Mac not so long ago, I am aware that Apple’s default picture managing software already had this feature, although I cannot really say how it worked. I did try iPhoto for a few hours on my first days with my new MacBook, but I immediately hated it for trying to hide my pictures from me. Picasa at least respects my organizational scheme at the file-system level, instead of imposing me one, and I am still able to access my pictures through Finder.

As Picasa recognizes faces, you can add information about this people as you tag them. It can even use (and sync with) your Google Account contacts if you are signed in to Picasa Web Albums. It would be nice though, if it gave you the choice in Mac OS X to use the system’s address book instead, or alternatively. And as a side note, face recognition is not the only new feature of Picasa 3.5, also including in the package geo-tagging with a Google Maps panel withing Picasa’s interface, and more. For the time being, this new version has only been released for Windows and Mac in its English version. Non-English speaking users, or Linux fans, will have to wait a bit. Not to say that Mac people should be completely happy though, because I am still waiting for Picasa to port the very nice picture viewer that it installs on Windows.

In the mean time, I can enjoy watching a slideshow of pictures with me and my girlfriend in it, or detailing how my niece’s face has changed over time since she was born just a few years ago. Face recognition rocks. But beware, if you are a fanatic of organization, it can get become addictive!

PS: I wanted to include a screenshot, but I don’t feel right to publish an image with lots of pictures of faces and names of actual people, without their consent, and painting black areas over names and faces renders the screenshot useless for its original purpose. So I am going on without it. If you want to see it working, download the program and give it a try.

Wolfram Alpha homepage

Wolfram Research has released a few weeks ago what could be the first instance of a computational knowledge engine, Wolfram Alpha. By a computational knowledge engine I mean a computing system in which we provide questions in natural language and receive meaningful and correct answers derived from internal knowledge and immense data-banks.

According to the project’s about page

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

As you can see, this is a work in progress. The system still has shortcomings, but it can already interpret and answer correctly many questions from a very diverse range of topics, that are not only limited to exact sciences.

Here are some examples of funny or insightful questions that amused me for a while…

• What is Wolfram Alpha?, What is your name? or Who are you?
• Where are you? and Where am I?
• What is my name? and My name is Ernesto
• What’s the second largest country in the world?
• Milk and apple juice or Milk vs apple juice

And before I finish, just as a curiosity, I asked Wolfram Alpha the last question a few minutes ago…

How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?

Unfortunately, there’s still insufficient data for a meaningful answer. The people behind this project have still a lot of work to do.

Kudos for all your great work and for this fine product!