AI reveals global clothing preferences by data-mining Instagram photos

"Imagine a future anthropologist with access to trillions of photos of people--taken over centuries and across the world--and equipped with effective tools for analyzing these photos to derive insights. What kinds of new questions can be answered?" This is the dream that has inspired Kevin Matzen, Kavita Bala, and Noah Snavely at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Their thinking is that the millions of photos uploaded each day to social media provide a fascinating window into the cultural, social, and economic factors that shape societies around the world. With powerful enough machine intelligence, they say, it ought to be possible to mine this mother lode of data for deep insights into our civilization.