Any time I whip out my digital camera, I know I have to deal with the arduous task of labeling and organizing the photos. It’s a painful process most people avoid and they usually just end up uploading their photos to a mass library, and just segregate albums by date. Take camera phone pictures, and the organization just gets worse. A project, led by Marc Davis of Yahoo’s Berkeley research lab in California, is trying to change how we manage our camera phone photos. The system works when someone uploads a photo, and the system logs the time of day, signal strength, and closest cell phone tower. Even cooler, is that the system also takes into account other cell phones present with Bluetooth turned on, and uses this info to create a list of names present during the snap shot. He hopes to combine all this data with facial recognition technology, and put the names from the Bluetooth enabled phones to faces. Apparently, facial recognition technology is accurate up to 43% on a crappy cell phone camera. Throw all this collected data in there and increase that number to 60%.

Via Newscientist