What your yearbook photo says about social evolution
Most likely to force a smile and say cheese!
CBC Radio ·
Discriminative clusters of high school girls’ styles from the 1970's. The left-most entry in each row displays the cluster average. (Shiry Ginosar)
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Spark9:47What your yearbook photo says about social evolution
This story first aired in December, 2015.
A team of computer scientists has used deep learning algorithms on thousands of yearbook photos to perform a scalable historical analysis of large collections of images. Shiry Ginosar explains how these photos have helped us gain new insights into everything from fashion to the evolution of the smile.
You can find most of the digitized American yearbooks at the Internet Archive.
Average images of high school students for each decade of the 20th century.
The left-most entry in each row displays the cluster average. The clusters correspond to the quintessential hair and accessory styles of each decade. These fashions emerge from the data in a weakly-supervised, data-driven process.
Smiles increasing over time, but women always smile more than men.
