The next time you pull out your smartphone and snap a photo of a landmark to upload to Facebook, think about the broader implications: Not only are you sharing your experience with your friends, but you’re contributing a small piece of data that could one day build a model of the world.
Researchers David Crandall of Indiana University and Noah Snavely of Cornell University are developing algorithms to create models of patterns based on the vast troves of photographs uploaded to Facebook, Flickr and other photo-sharing websites each day. Not only can their models be used to build 3D representations of a place, but they can also shed light on the people who visit those places.
“This analysis can also generate statistics about places, such as ranking landmarks by their popularity or studying which kinds of users visit which sites,” Crandall and Snavely wrote in
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