Found is a webapp that acts as a smart “lost and found” for people. It’s is one of those apps that you always hope you never have to use, but you’re sure glad exists.
Found is a platform for connecting people who have “lost” someone with people who have “found” someone.
Imagine there is a large-scale disaster and you can’t get in contact with a loved one in the affected area. You go on Found, post pictures of your “lost” loved one along with some basic information about them, and provide your contact information. The Clarifai API memorizes your loved one’s face as you upload photos of them.
At the disaster site, early responders take photos of everyone they’ve “found.” When they upload these photos to Found and a face is recognized as a match to your “lost” loved one, you get an email notification with their whereabouts and status.
WHY WE ❤ IT
Found is one of those apps that could make a big difference to people in crisis all over the world. You can check out the GitHub repo and try it for yourself. Plus, it was created by one of our talented dev evangelists, so we’re biased.
HOW YOU DO IT
We asked Cassidy Williams of the Found team to tell us how she came up with the app and what she used to build it. Here’s what she had to say:
Clarifai: What inspired your idea for Found?
Cassidy: The hackathon I entered, Bluemixathon, prompted us to create something that could be useful in disastrous situations – I wanted to do something that used Clarifai’s image recognition API to help people in disasters.
Clarifai: What part does the Clarifai API play in your app?
Cassidy: Recognizing a human face is something every person can do in varying degrees. However, recognizing and memorizing hundreds and thousands of faces is very hard if not impossible for a single person. With machine learning capabilities like Clarifai, it has become easier and easier to train machines to detect minute and subtle changes, particularly in faces. We thought that it would make sense to use this facial recognition technology to help reconnect people to their loved ones.
Clarifai: What’s the magic sauce behind your Clarifai implementation?
Cassidy: I used pure JavaScript, baby. Found was built using the Clarifai API for machine learning and image recognition, Imgur API for image uploading, Mandrill for emails, and BlueMix to deploy it all.
Clarifai: What else do you hope to do with Found?
Cassidy: We would like to incorporate GPS locations as well as a build a phone app to help people assisting in rescue missions take pictures on the go.
Thanks for sharing, Cassidy!
To learn more, check out our documentation and sign-up for a free Clarifai account to start using our API – all it takes is three lines of code to get up and running! We’re super excited to share all the cool things built by our developer community, so don’t forget to tweet @Clarifai to show us your apps.
