After the success of our first introduction to Virtual Reality and Mobile applications, we decided to take a further look into how Snapchat became what it is now. The field of data science has really expanded, especially from all the data it now has access to.
The facial recognition technology used here is all the result of this Ukrainian start-up called, Looksery; which was recently acquired by Snapchat for as much as 150 millions dollars. Although Snapchat doesn’t seem to be making much noise about the same as they want to maintain their position, by remaining a more light hearted application. At the basic level a computer vision is used, which is based on the patterns that are seen of a human face, so you would see those certain neon or white colored points either under your eyebrows, tip of your nose and such. While the face recognition technology used by Snapchat goes a step ahead, to get that perfect specific setting, so that a dog nose sits exactly on your nose and not on your chin. The firm actually got itself involved into a lot of rigorous research and development, where this system was trained with numerous, manually drawn points on faces, which would help it make the filter look real. After several tries, this system is then able to mask your entire face perfectly, with the help of those points. This Snapchat trend is not just powerful, but also has sparked off trends with websites like Facebook and Google, dabbling in the field of face recognition software as well.
The field of Data Science would be one of the first ones to benefit from this ever increasing phenomenon. As Snapchat is already generating scores of data with their ever popular filters, it can also encourage advanced data analytics processes so as to enhance end customer service. This would add to the ever increasing demand for professionals, proficient in the skills of data anlytics. A lot of institutes have begun to pick up on this trend and are now offering specialized programs. For instance Imarticus Learning is one such institute that offers courses, which meet the current industry demands of data analytics tools like R Programming, SAS Programming, Hadoop and others.
And, yes, Snapchat is currently hiring for Data Scientists.