AI helps identify Holocaust victims

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Holocaust victims helped by AI - 19th December 2022

A new AI – artificial intelligence – program can help give names to Jewish Holocaust victims, who died during the Second World War.

The program, called 'From Numbers to Names' uses AI to match survivors' faces with a collection of over 34,000 old photos. That's nearly 200,000 faces.

The website was designed by software engineer Daniel Patt, who's working with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. According to the museum's curator, Scott Miller, doing this task is a kind of ' memorial to the entire Jewish community.'

Recently, Holocaust survivor Blanche Fixler saw a fresh picture of herself from the past. She was just a child when her close family was killed. Thanks to her aunt Rose, she escaped the Nazis by hiding inside a bed.

Fixler, now 86 and living in New York, uploaded an old family photo to From Numbers to Names. Patt and his AI software recognised Fixler's face in a school photo. It had been taken in France, during the war.

When Patt travelled to New York and showed Fixler the photo, she was able to recognise her aunt Rose and a school friend. Importantly, that also meant three extra names for Patt and the museum. Those names are valuable because one in six Jewish people from the Holocaust are still nameless.

As Miller explained, ' Six million Jews were killed, but it's really one person six million times. Every person has a name, every person has a face.'