How A South End Artist's Face Recognition App Is Fighting Disease

What happens when a tech artist and her gene-scientist husband try to wow the crowd at a "Nerd Nite" event in Kendall Square? They pitch an idea for an app to help fight disease by crowd-sourcing millions of 3-D digital maps of human faces. Facetopo was the brainchild of Boston documentarian and artist Alberta Chu and her husband Murray Robinson, whose brother was diagnosed with a rare disease that, like Down's syndrome, can be detected in the face. In a Q&A with Patch, Chu says some day participants could "maybe trade pictures, or eventually, find a twin." "Every user who wants to participate creates a private account and is able to download the app on either IOS or Android where we provide instructions so that you can create a 3-D face map. We have almost 4,000 faces from everywhere but we need millions in order for this to be an actual big data project. How many faces do you need to move forward with your findings? "Our milestone goal is 10,000 faces and, once we have that, we will publish our first face tree in the form of a dendogram, which is a way of looking at a large amount of biological information.