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status: published
title: About MegaPixels
desc: About MegaPixels
slug: about
cssclass: about
published: 2018-12-04
updated: 2018-12-04
authors: Adam Harvey

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# About MegaPixels

<section class="about-menu">
<ul>
<li><a class="current" href="/about/">About</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/faq/">FAQs</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/press/">Press</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/terms/">Terms</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/privacy/">Privacy</a></li>
</ul>
</section>

MegaPixels is an independent art and research project by Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace investigating the ethics and individual privacy implications of publicly available face recognition datasets, and their role in industry and governmental expansion into biometric surveillance technologies.

The MegaPixels site is made possible with support from <a href="http://mozilla.org">Mozilla</a>

<div class="flex-container team-photos-container">
    <div class="team-member">
        <h3>Adam Harvey</h4>
        <p>is Berlin-based American artist and researcher. His previous projects (CV Dazzle, Stealth Wear, and SkyLift) explore the potential for counter-surveillance as artwork. He is the founder of VFRAME (visual forensics software for human rights groups) and is a currently researcher in residence at Karlsruhe HfG.</p>
        <p><a href="https://ahprojects.com">ahprojects.com</a></p>
        </p>
    </div>
    <div class="team-member">
        <h3>Jules LaPlace</h3>
        <p>is an American technologist and artist also based in Berlin. He was previously the CTO of a digital agency in NYC and now also works at VFRAME, developing computer vision and data analysis software for human rights groups. Jules also builds experimental software for artists and musicians.
        </p>
        <p><a href="https://asdf.us/">asdf.us</a></p>
    </div>
</div>

MegaPixels.cc is an independent research project about publicly available face recognition datasets. This website is based, in part, on earlier installations and research project about facial recognition datasets in 2016-2018, in particular the MegaFace dataset. Since then it has evolved into a large-scale survey and analysis of publicly available face and person analysis dataset usage, geographies, and ethics.

An academic report and presentation on the findings is forthcoming. This site is published to make the research more accessible to a wider audience and to include visualizations and interactive features not possible in PDF publications. Continued research on MegaPixles is supported by a 1 year Researcher-in-Residence grant from Karlsruhe HfG.

When possible, and once thoroughly verified, data generated for MegaPixels will be made available for download on [github.com/adamhrv/megapixels](https://github.com/adamhrv/megapixels)

#### Team

- Adam Harvey: Concept, research, design, computer vision
- Jules LaPlace: Information and systems architecture, data retrieval, web applications

#### Contributing Researchers

- Berit Gilma: Dataset statistics and discovery
- Beth (aka Ms. Celeb): Dataset usage verification and research
- Mathana Stender: Commercial usage verification and research on LFW

#### Code and Libraries

- [Semantic Scholar](https://semanticscholar.org) for citation aggregation
- Leaflet.js for maps
- C3.js for charts
- D3.js and ThreeJS for 3D visualizations
- PDFMiner.Six and Pandas for research paper data analysis

Please direct questions, comments, or feedback to [mastodon.social/@adamhrv](https://mastodon.social/@adamhrv)