Here’s how image recognition works in a nutshell. It starts with identifying points of interest in an image — the points, lines, and patterns that provide sharp contrasts or really stick out from a bland, featureless background. It’s similar in some ways to how the human eye picks out edges and points by keying off the places where there’s sharp contrast.
Then it looks at how these points are related to each other — the geometry of the whole set of points. You could picture it as looking like a constellation of stars, even though really it’s a more sophisticated mathematical model of these points of interest and how they relate.
Now it compares that model to all the other models in a huge database. Those other models come from images it has already analyzed from around the web. It looks for a matching model, but it doesn’t have to be a perfect match. In fact, it’s important that it be a bit flexible, so it doesn’t matter if it’s turned around, or shrunken, or twisted a bit. The Taj Mahal still has the basic geometry of the Taj Mahal even if you photograph it from a little bit of a different angle or photograph it lower in the frame. When Google recognizes that it matches that model best, it guesses it’s probably the Taj Mahal.
I think Hackers will have the last laugh after all. When hackers finally build an AI, it will also be the first soul. An intelligent mind decoupled from a body and thus capable of being immortal. The first step in this direction was the stored program concept itself which was best articulated by Von Neumann (http://qss.stanford.edu/~godfrey/vonNeumann/vnedvac.pdf) and realized in the EDVAC. This allowed programs to be decoupled from hardware. Dennis Ritchie, whose loss we all mourn, made what I consider the second big step. Decoupling large software systems from hardware, via a portable operating system. It will take a while (10-20 years?), but maybe something like ROS (http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/ros-platform) will someday become a full mind that is still decoupled from any particular hardware...a soul!!!
Sometime back I had to get passport photos and was very pissed that Walgreens and CVS charge about $10 for 2 photos. This seemed inexplicable as the cost of a typical 4x6 print is about 10c at Snapfish (or 19c at Walgreens). Realizing that they were exploiting the fact that most people didn't know how to format passport photos themselves, I decided to create a webapp that does the required formatting automatically. OpenCV's fast face detector (it uses the current best Viola-Jones algorithm http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/viola/) proved invaluable for this. You can check out the results at: http://freepassportphoto.dyndns.org/
Any suggestions for improvement from you guys would be greatly appreciated.
Here's a prediction:
Since facebook "senior executives" are so fond of central planning, i.e., personally picking winners and losers for kickbacks, instead of creating a level playing field and letting the users pick the best services, its very likely that facebook will suffer the same fate as other centrally planned entities...viz., run into the calculation problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem). They'll make one big miscalculation that will be the end of it. The most obvious miscalculation is mismanaging security, letting in a potent virus that takes down all or enough of facebook's servers.
I think Milton Friedman nailed it when he said that the biggest obstacle to a freer immigration policy is the welfare state.
"[Throughout the history of the U.S.] you had a flood of immigrants, millions of them, coming to this country. What brought them here? It was the hope for a better life for them and their children. And, in the main, they succeeded. It is hard to find any century in history, in which so large a number of people experienced so great an improvement in the conditions of their life, in the opportunities open to them, as in the period of the 19th and early 20th century.
You will find hardly a soul who will say that it was a bad thing. Almost everybody will say it was a good thing. ‘But what about today? Do you think we should have free immigration?’ ‘Oh, no,’ they’ll say, ‘We couldn’t possibly have free immigration today. Why, that would flood us with immigrants from India, and God knows where. We’d be driven down to a bare subsistence level.’
What’s the difference? How can people be so inconsistent? Why is it that free immigration was a good thing before 1914 and free immigration is a bad thing today? Well, there is a sense in which that answer is right. There’s a sense in which free immigration, in the same sense as we had it before 1914 is not possible today. Why not?
Because it is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he or she works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.
If you have free immigration, in the way we had it before 1914, everybody benefited. The people who were here benefited. The people who came benefited. Because nobody would come unless he, or his family, thought he would do better here than he would elsewhere. And, the new immigrants provided additional resources, provided additional possibilities for the people already here. So everybody can mutually benefit.
But on the other hand, if you come under circumstances where each person is entitled to a pro-rata share of the pot, to take an extreme example, or even to a low level of the pie, than the effect of that situation is that free immigration, would mean a reduction of everybody to the same, uniform level. Of course, I’m exaggerating, it wouldn’t go quite that far, but it would go in that direction. And it is that perception, that leads people to adopt what at first seems like inconsistent values."
I don't know if engineering is the world's second oldest profession, but its interesting to know what google says is the world's oldest profession: prostitution!
Yeah, this (article) seems to be totally at odds with the hacker ethic, expressed variously as:
Jon Bentley in Programming Pearls:
Column 2.5 "Aha! Algorithms"
"Good hackers are a little bit lazy: they sit back and wait for an insight rather than rushing forward with their first idea. That must, of course, be balanced with initiative to code at the proper time. The real skill, though, is knowing the proper time. That judgment comes only with the experience of solving problems and reflecting on their solutions."
Larry Wall in "Three virtues of a programmer"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_program...
"1. Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer."
John D Cook in "Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity?"
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/12/23/why-programmers-are...
"Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. They may realize the problem they’re being asked to solve doesn’t need to be solved, that the client doesn’t actually want what they’re asking for. They may know where to find reusable or re-editable code that solves their problem. They may cheat. But just when they are being their most productive, nobody says "Wow! You were just 100x more productive than if you’d done this the hard way. You deserve a raise." At best they say "Good idea!" and go on. It may take a while to realize that someone routinely comes up with such time-saving insights. Or to put it negatively, it may take a long time to realize that others are programming with sound and fury but producing nothing."
Here’s how image recognition works in a nutshell. It starts with identifying points of interest in an image — the points, lines, and patterns that provide sharp contrasts or really stick out from a bland, featureless background. It’s similar in some ways to how the human eye picks out edges and points by keying off the places where there’s sharp contrast.
Then it looks at how these points are related to each other — the geometry of the whole set of points. You could picture it as looking like a constellation of stars, even though really it’s a more sophisticated mathematical model of these points of interest and how they relate.
Now it compares that model to all the other models in a huge database. Those other models come from images it has already analyzed from around the web. It looks for a matching model, but it doesn’t have to be a perfect match. In fact, it’s important that it be a bit flexible, so it doesn’t matter if it’s turned around, or shrunken, or twisted a bit. The Taj Mahal still has the basic geometry of the Taj Mahal even if you photograph it from a little bit of a different angle or photograph it lower in the frame. When Google recognizes that it matches that model best, it guesses it’s probably the Taj Mahal.