Identv: The Long Shot

Rothco, part of Accenture Interactive, worked with machine learning and AI experts at Identv to help solve a 57-year-old mystery involving a famous prison break. Recognising that digital and physical imagery are converging in fascinating new ways, the two organisations set out to tell the story of how applied artificial intelligence (AI) helped confirm the identities of two Alcatraz prison escapees depicted in a 1975 photo. Thirty-six people are known to have attempted escape from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security facility located on an island in San Francisco Bay. But the commonly-held belief is that none were successful. On the night of June 11th, 1962, three prisoners -- Frank Morris, along with brothers John and Clarence Anglin -- broke out of their cells and made it to the shoreline of Alcatraz island. The trio, made famous by Clint Eastwood in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz, used sharpened spoons to bore through the prison walls and left papier-maché dummies in their beds. They are assumed to have drowned as they fled the island on a raft constructed from 50 inflated raincoats. In 2015, evidence surfaced of a soft, grainy, old photo taken by a family friend of the Anglin Brothers allegedly living in Brazil in 1975 -- 13 years after their supposed drowning. But the technology has not been available to confirm that the men in the photo are the actual escaped prisoners until now. Rothco worked with Identv to tell the story of 'The Long Shot', bringing new life to a forgotten mystery by unlocking the hidden data in the printed photo. The Irish agency partnered with the machine learning and AI experts at Identv to unlock the photo by using a facial matching system based on a type of machine learning algorithm called a deep neural network.