[aub3bhat]

This looks like a really cool work for a beginner and I do not mean to diminish his effort in any way.

But face recognition is a sensitive/politically-charged topic, I know several grad students (including me) who inspite of having ready-to-deploy scalable software and datasets (~10M instagram images) stay away from doing this type of a demo because reputational risks are enormous. Consider the controversy around geofeedia etc. The last thing you want as a PhD student is press interpreting your research incorrectly and blaming you for causing widespread harm. It happened to a student/professor in my department and even then the infamous study in question was in collaboration with the social network.

There are several cool alternatives, apply it to movies, video game faces etc.

[Eridrus]

This ship has already sailed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FindFace

[chrisfosterelli]

Although they often have less data (but it wouldn't really matter in this case since he used a pretrained model), he could have used one of the many public face recognition datasets that are already out there and exist exactly for this purpose like LFW [0].

[0] http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/