Beta testing: Riya does surprisingly well
Riya Rocks
The Riya uploader finished uploading 3000+ pictures, and I’ve been going through a series of training sessions to it to recognize more and more faces.
What surprised me the most is how well Riya is at detecting faces in a picture - not recognizing, but detecting.
Riya even found faces in poorly lit pictures and pictures where only the face part of the head was visible - and it detects faces even when most of the head is covered by a riding helmet.
When it came to recognizing faces Riya performed very well. Most of the times it was right on spot, and the times when Riya was in doubt it usually suggested the parents or the children of the people in the pictures - spooky 
So, that’s why Riya rocks.
Riya Sux
Now, the place where Riya sux is it’s lack of feedback. Because Riya has an AJAXy interface you don’t have the usual old-style clues such as waiting for a new page to be fecthed and displayed.
You’re not really sure if Riya is working hard behind the scenes to process data, or if you just didn’t click the button properly.
Another interface related issue is when you do Simple Training. If your list of known names is longer than what can fit into the height of your browserwindow you will have to scroll to the bottom of the name frame before you drag pictures unto their names.
There’s plenty of whitespace to the right of the pictures, so I think it would be really cool to have names appear there also.
This could be something like:
- The names sorted in reverse.
- Commonly used names.
- Less commonly used names.
- Names already used in the session.
- Names not used in the session yet.
- The names that most closely match the faces on the page (but still not over the threshold for certain or almost certain matches)
Or the list of names could simply scroll when the mouse it at either the top or the bottom of the frame.
Another thing I would like to see changed is the colour of the names in the name frame. When you drag a picture over the list of names, the list will be dimmed except for the name the picture is currently over.
This makes it hard to move the picture quickly to it’s name because “you can’t see where you’re going”.
It would make it much easier if the names still remained clearly visible, and the current name just got highlighted.
It’s really unfair to label this section as Riya Sux, but this is one of three different tags that Riya suggested beta testers to use
