Private Photos, Public Picture

"Time-Lapse Mining from Internet Photos"               photo credit: Nadav Tobias

We all know by now that what we do in Vegas ~ or anywhere else ~ rarely stays in Vegas ~ or anywhere else. Take vacation pictures. Google and University of Washington researchers have created a program that combines photos of the same places into time-lapse videos. They used shots uploaded to public sites, sorted them by place tags and time stamps, removed the people, and manipulated them so that they show more or less the same perspective. The result tracks, for example, a glacier as it retreats or a skyscraper as it's built. Scientists elsewhere are using more or less the same technology to examine human behavior (story, video): https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/culture-beaker/your-photos-reveal-more-where-you-went-vacation