Daniel Patt, a software engineer for Google, is the founder of a website called From Numbers to Names, which uses artificial intelligence to find old photographs of loved ones and relatives lost during the Holocaust.

From Numbers to Names has links to archives that contain about 500,000 photos from museums such as Yad Vashem — the World Holocaust Remembrance Center and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Anyone can upload a photo of a Holocaust victim or survivor to the site, and it will compare the photo to its archives. Facial recognition technology then finds the ten best potential matches among photos from the archives.

Patt’s four grandparents are Holocaust survivors from Poland, His initial goal was to help his grandmother find photos of the members of her family murdered by in the Holocaust. His grandmother was just 9 years old when the war started and fled from her hometown of Zamość eastward with her father and siblings, while her mother — Patt’s great-grandmother — stayed behind. Her mother was shot and killed during the Nazi invasion, and Patt’s great-uncle — his grandmother’s brother — was subsequently killed when he went back to rescue her. The rest of the family survived and emigrated to New York City after the war.

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