A Look Behind How One of the World's Most Popular Brands Harnessed an Internet Meme

This post is authored by Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President of the Data Group at Microsoft. A few months ago, I was trying to find a clever way to illustrate the power of machine learning to software developers at Microsoft's //BUILD conference. So, using the face analysis API we had recently published on the Cortana Analytics Gallery, we built the web site How-Old.net When we showed it off at //BUILD, the application went viral, and over 85 million users submitted over 500 million images to test it, and to mock and try to fool the application. It became a social media sensation.