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Is your profile photo unforgettable? MIT can tell you

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab built a free tool that lets you know if your mug is memorable or forgettable.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott

If you aren't getting any bites on a dating site or are finding it to be slow going on a social network, perhaps your profile picture isn't allowing you to stand out from the deafening online crowd. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab built a Web app it calls LaMem, which is short for large-scale image memorability.

LaMem uses an algorithm and a database of more than 60,000 images to judge on a scale of 0 to 1 how memorable a photo is. A score of 1 is the most memorable, and a score of 0.5 means that 50-percent of people who view your image will remember it after 100 seconds.

Head to LaMem's demo page to try it out yourself. You can upload a photo or simply paste in a URL to point to an image online. LaMem will scan your photo and spit out a score. There is also a slider below your image to show a heat map of the areas of your photo that are most (red) and least (blue) memorable.

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Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

To point LaMem to one of your profile photos online, in Chrome you can just right-click on the photo and select Open Image in New Tab. Then grab that URL to paste into LaMem.

For more on the work that went into LaMem, check out TechCrunch's coverage.