Catalyst Conversations at MIT #CCFaces

Last night was the first public presentation of Facetopo. MIT's Bartos Theater was filled with an assortment of artists, curators, geneticists, art and science collaborators, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, and technologists. 

The idea for FaceTopo was hatched by Murray Robinson and Alberta Chu and evolved from their Nerdnite Boston talks of Fall 2013. For the past year, Chu and Robinson have been working to develop Facetopo. The Facetopo ios App will be the sample intake arm for citizen scientists who are curious to learn what’s in a face. Who will use FaceTopo? Some will be genealogists curious about family faces, others will be seeking their facetwins or lookalikes in the world. At any rate, the Facetopo app is nearly complete and is accepting beta-testers now. Register online to help betatest and you’ll receive an email when the app is ready for testing in May. Anyone over age 14 will be able to make a Facetopo by creating a private user account. The more data we can gather of diverse faces around the world, the more interesting and relevant our findings will be to all faces. If you missed it, the event video is available on the Catalyst Conversations website.

Big High-5’s to the Facetopo Team: @protodeep, @sunnysmog, @gordonklarson, Connor Stone, and all of our wonderful testers so far - there have been so many friends and family who have helped out - we are grateful! Thanks to Julia Swanson, @_katacus_, and @emmaratliff for social media support. Many thanks to Deborah Davidson for giving us the opportunity to present our work as part of the monthly Cambridge, MA science-art lecture series Catalyst Conversations. Thanks to the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Gulnara Niaz photography, and to all of our friends who came to the event and supported us on social media.

Photo Credit: Stephanie Dvareckas