Aditya Khosla’s guide to becoming more popular.
By The American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: MIT Ph.D candidate in computer science Aditya Khosla has come up with an analysis that is a guide to how to get more popular on the social media world through the right photographs of oneself.
Using data culled from the analysis of 2.3 million Flickr photos, Khosla developed an algorithm that can predict the popularity of a photo (as it its actual view count) with a high degree of accuracy, based not just on a user’s amount of social influence (previous models already do that) but also factoring in image content, reported Tech Crunch.
Khosla’s algorithm takes into account factors like color, types of objects included, tags and more to work out how many people will like, look at or share that image.
Khosla recommends what some people know well enough: sexy shots work best, with prominent displays of “bikinis, bras and mini-skirts” working wonders on the social media.
Verve reported that Khosla says his algorithm allows him to predict how many views your photo will get before you even upload it. The algorithm considers social factors such as how many followers a user has, the number of tags on the photo, and the length of the title. It also measures content factors such as texture, color, gradient, and objects present in the photo. Miniskirts, bright colors, people instead of scenery = good. Plungers = bad. Pink and yellow miniskirts, even better. Green plungers, horrible.
Khosla hopes to eventually be able to automatically modify pictures with edits that make them more popular, on sites like Instagram.
Khosla completed his M.S. at Stanford University in 2011 and B.S. at the California Institute of Technology in 2009. His current research focus is on applying computer vision and machine learning techniques to human memory. Recent research shows that the extent to which an image is remembered is largely a property of the image and not of the individual. This means that despite varied experiences, individuals tend to remember and forget the same images.
His research on photos is akin to having a new filter on Instagram called “Memorable” that makes certain modifications to an image or a face to make it more or less memorable. This technology could have significant impact on the way people design images for various applications; advertisers could make their advertising more memorable and thereby more effective, or teachers could modify textbook diagrams to allow them to be easily remembered by students.