The "How Old" age-prediction program became an Internet sensation this year. Users could upload photos of themselves and the online tool would guess their age, sometimes correctly, sometimes not.
But for Manly Council's chief information officer, Nathan Rogers, he saw other possibilities. He set out to develop a system that could analyse photos of buses instead - specifically, buses overstaying their allotted time in parking bays.
The council has now linked the program to CCTV cameras so it can detect when a vehicle has been parked for too long and automatically sends an email alert to rangers.
"Rangers don't have a sixth sense and don't instinctively know where to go," Mr Rogers said. "Now they can know what's happening a few blocks from them."
Manly council set up the system using an initial 10,000 photos featuring different parking scenarios but it continues to develop its photo bank.
"Because it's a trained piece of technology, it isn't 100 per cent accurate," Mr Rogers said.
Developing the basic program took about two hours and cost Manly council $75.
The low cost of the project was partly due to the fact that it builds on camera footage the council already collects, according to Microsoft Australia's IoT business group lead Lee Hickin.
"They looked at the data they already had and then looked at the problems that were interesting to them," Mr Hickin said.
"They're not looking to go and spend more money on building more infrastructure.
"A lot of councils are already gathering data, and Nathan [Rogers] demonstrated that it's very quick to unlock a little bit of insight out of that data with the right tools in place."
Microsoft is currently working with a number of councils to find other uses for the program such as crowd control, waste management and surf prediction.
"There's certainly a level of excitement in the government sector around using the data we have to optimise services for citizens," Mr Hickin said.
