How Machine Learning Will Help Sky Viewers Spot Celebs At The Royal Wedding

Celebrity spotting at this weekend's Royal Wedding will be an automated activity for millions of Sky customers, as the broadcaster will use machine learning technology from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to name famous guests as they enter the chapel. The guests will automatically be labelled with a name tag when they reach George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, and added to a list that includes a bite-sized biography and details on their connection to the Royal couple. Viewers can then watch the service on-demand and navigate through the footage to the arrival of specific guests. Sky claims that this is the world's first live machine learning project on a large-scale event, but it may not have been possible if the wedding was just one week later, as the GDPR implementation date arrives on Friday 25 May. Sky has not received the guest list, so the broadcaster researched the likely invitees and used their images as the training data set for the system to recognise their faces.