World First: International Beauty Contest to Be Judged By Robots

Robot Jury

For the first time, an international beauty contest will be judged solely by a panel of robots. The contest will require participants to take selfies using a special app and submit their images on the contest website. The app, which runs on very sophisticated facial recognition platform, and algorithms will essentially be able to allow machines to judge beauty in humans.

To analyze beauty, the robots will review numerous age-related changes on the human face based on people from different ages, ethnicities, as well as nationalities, and evaluate how these changes impact people’s perception of beauty. 

“Recent advances in Deep Learning have made machine recognition of beauty aspects far better than ever before,” assures Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, a consultant for the competition and CEO of Insilco Medicine, a company that focuses on aging research. Now, these advancements will be put to a rather unique test.

"This contest will help build impartial feature-specific and general robots that will help us understand our faces. But my personal dream is to have this contest extended into anti-aging and general healthcare space,” said Nastya Georgievskaya, robot tutor at Youth Laboratories, a company developing deep learning systems for facial analysis.

“People may not care about how to extend their lifespans, but they definitely care about the way they look,” Zhavoronkov adds.

AI Framework

The beauty contest not only marks a milestone for the industry, but also for aspiring programmers who want to submit their algorithms that can potentially determine beauty standards. On the website, coders are invited to “go down in history as one of the first data scientists who taught a machine to estimate human attractiveness.”

In a way, this makes the contest a crowd-sourced event.

In addition, the contest will also see the launch of apps that, hopefully, allows people to track the effects of various products on the human face.

Ultimately, the effort to make machines that are capable of understanding beauty is spurred on by an anti-aging industry, which hopes to come to understand youth better and determine new ways to monitor and maintain a young appearance.