Online dating has become a way of life for folks looking for love in the freewheeling, tap-and-swipe culture that dominates the 21 st century. According to the Pew Research Center , online dating sites or mobile dating app usage by to year-olds has increased nearly threefold since , while usage by to year-olds has doubled. FaceDate was created by Ph. FaceDate users are able to train the mobile app by uploading photos of faces they find attractive, and the app will provide matches, using a face recognition algorithm.
To speed up execution and conserve phone battery life, the app uses cloud-computing infrastructure. And the face recognition tasks can run on your smartphone or be offloaded to the cloud. This novel feature simplifies user interaction and maintains user privacy—all while suggesting a location-based, mutual match in real time. The Android-based FaceDate is currently in the prototype phase on Moitree, a middleware for cloud-assisted mobile distributed apps, and geared toward 18 and 30 year olds.
The app developers applied for a patent in , and plan to roll out the first phase of FaceDate exclusively to NJIT students in the coming months, with the hope of securing funding for further development and implementation on iOS. Borcea jokes that his students really created the app because they want to date around campus. And in the process, the young techies have also nudged the needle forward when it comes to the way people use technology to establish romantic relationships.
Written by: Shydale James. Learn More.
