Exploring Photos in Facebook

Facebook has rapidly become for many the dominant means for sharing images, and the number of shared images accessible to any given Facebook user is easily in the tens of thousands. The sheer volume of pictures relegates most to obscurity, yet some of those pictures would be of great interest -- if a person could only find them. This research explores ways to harness latent semantic information associated with pictures and interpersonal relationships to enable a person to browse for potentially interesting and germane images shared by people in their social network. The possibilities for semantic analysis are endless, this work illustrates two possible approaches while also highlighting future potential applications of semantic understanding.