October 17, 2007, 8:09 PM CT

Giving Computers Common Sense

Using a little-known Google Labs widget, computer researchers from UC San Diego and UCLA have brought common sense to an automated image labeling system. This common sense is the ability to use context to help identify objects in photographs.

For example, if a conventional automated object identifier has labeled a person, a tennis racket, a tennis court and a lemon in a photo, the new post-processing context check will re-label the lemon as a tennis ball.

"We think our paper is the first to bring external semantic context to the problem of object recognition," said computer science professor Serge Belongie from UC San Diego.

The scientists show that the Google Labs tool called Google Sets can be used to provide external contextual information to automated object identifiers. The paper will be presented on Thursday 18 October 2007 at ICCV 2007 - the 11th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Google Sets generates lists of related items or objects from just a few examples. If you type in John, Paul and George, it will return the words Ringo, Beatles and John Lennon. If you type "neon" and "argon" it will give you the rest of the noble gasses.

"In some ways, Google Sets is a proxy for common sense. In our paper, we showed that you can use this common sense to provide contextual information that improves the accuracy of automated image labeling systems," said Belongie......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

October 10, 2007, 4:55 AM CT

Vocal Joystick uses voice to surf the Web

The Internet offers wide appeal to people with disabilities. But a number of of those same people find it frustrating or impossible to use a handheld mouse. Software developed at the University of Washington provides an alternative using the oldest and most versatile mode of communication: the human voice.

"There are a number of people who have perfect use of their voice who don't have use of their hands and arms," said Jeffrey Bilmes, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering. "I think there are several reasons why Vocal Joystick might be a better approach, or at least a viable alternative, to brain-computer interfaces." The tool's latest developments will be presented this month in Tempe, Ariz. at the Assets Conference on Computers and Accessibility.

Vocal Joystick detects sounds 100 times a second and instantaneously turns that sound into movement on the screen. Different vowel sounds dictate the direction: "ah," "ee," "aw" and "oo" and other sounds move the cursor one of eight directions. Users can transition smoothly from one vowel to another, and louder sounds make the cursor move faster. The sounds "k" and "ch" simulate clicking and releasing the mouse buttons.

Versions of Vocal Joystick exist for browsing the Web, drawing on a screen, controlling a cursor and playing a video game. A version also exists for operating a robotic arm, and Bilmes believes the technology could be used to control an electronic wheelchair......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

October 8, 2007, 8:44 AM CT

Researcher traces history of the personal computer

Carbon paper? Punch cards? What are those?

The Internet, personal computers, word processing and spreadsheets are so embedded in todays society that its hard to remember that just 35 years ago they didnt exist.

Thomas Haigh, assistant professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), is among a very small number of computer experts in the world who are also historians, studying the role of technology in broader social change. These new experts are tracing how computers have changed business and society.

Researching late 20th century technology has given Haigh the opportunity to talk to a number of pioneers who developed both computers and the software that powers them. He conducted a series of oral history interviews for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and has written about the history of word processing and the development of databases.

One constant Haigh has found in the froth of change in technology is that businesses and employees are constantly trying to figure out how to make the new gadgets and processes work for them.

Theres this feeling that anything more than five years old is irrelevant, but one of the things Ive found is that people are facing the same types of problems now as they did in the mid-1950s projects using new technology are commonly late and filled with bugs, the return on investment is hard to measure and computer specialists are expensive and speak an alien language......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 11:40:33 GMT

Google Turns 9!

Yes, today's Google's 9th birthday. Nine years may seem so short a time to create a giant company. But Google is an exceptional exception!

Google.stanford.edu in late 1997. Sergey Brin in 1999 says, "A perfect search engine will process and understand all the information in the world .... That is where Google is headed."

Google.com, meanwhile, started as a search engine and it remains as such up until today. The difference is that it is trying to be much more than that. What has become of Google? Philipp Lenssen has an accurate list of the search engine giant's achievements....

* "The Google homepage goes out of Beta
* A Google Friends newsletter is started to address "Googlers," originally the term for Google users
* Google teams up with RealNames to bring now-forgotten Internet Keyword support to their search engine
* Google bought a huge Newsgroup archive from Deja News and turned it into Google Groups. The first mention of Madonna on the internet is now owned by Google Inc.
* Google created a technology playground called Google Labs, where they release tools such as Google Sets
* Yahoo switches to Google results, but later changes their mind and develops their own search engine back-end to compete with Google and Microsoft in the club of the three only high-scale search engines worldwide
* Eric Emerson Schmidt, then 46, replaces Larry Page, then 28 years old, as boss of Google
* Google shows context-relevant AdWords in search results, and later AdSense on external websites
* Aaron Swartz starts posting news on Google on the Google Weblog
* Google releases more and more company blogs to communicate with people outside the company
* Google releases Gmail, which many thought was an April Fool's prank due to the at the time incredible storage of 1 Gigabyte
* Google went through an Initial Public Offering, meaning the company gets special attention from stock market investors
* Google enters China and decides to compromise its mission by self-censoring human rights websites, proclaiming a change from "don't ever be evil, period" to "scales balancing what Google thinks is least evil"
* Google releases a set of programming frameworks called GData
* Google releases a set of client-side, ad-powered JavaScript APIs, ditching support for their server-side, ad-free SOAP API
* Google releases a word processor, a spreadsheet editor, and later a presentations tool, all with a focus on online collaboration
* Google publishes their Google Apps suite for companies
* Google starts showing good-resolution photos of people on the streets as part of mining public information and making it accessible
* Google's co-founder Sergey Brin in a speech given on a Google Developer Day says we've come full circle, as the generation which grew up with the web is now starting to create on the web, determining its shape.... a self-increasing feedback loop causing exponentially growing development (or so one would hope).
* and much, much more."

Happy Birthday Google! Posted by: noel      Read more     Source

October 2, 2007, 9:51 PM CT

Fighting phishing attacks with phishing tactics

Early findings by Carnegie Mellon University scientists suggest that people who are suckered by a spoof email into visiting a counterfeit Web site are also people who are ready to learn their lesson about phishing attacks.

Phishing attacks have become a common method for stealing personal identification information, such as bank account numbers and passwords. Lorrie Cranor, associate research professor of computer science, said phishing often is successful because a number of people ignore educational materials that otherwise might help them recognize such frauds.

But in a laboratory study, the scientists fought phire with phire and observed that when they sent their own spoof email to users and tricked them into visiting an educational Web site, those people tended to learn and retain more of the lesson about how to spot phishing sites.

Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, a graduate student in the School of Computer Sciences Institute for Software Research, will present the study results Friday, Oct. 5 at the Anti-Phishing Working Groups (APWG) eCrime Scientists Summit in Pittsburgh. The summit, sponsored by the APWG and hosted by Carnegie Mellon CyLab, includes leading industrial and academic practitioners in the field of electronic crime research.

In the study, three groups of 14 volunteers participated in role-playing exercises in which they processed email, which included a mix of phishing, spam and legitimate email. Those in the embedded training group, who were given anti-phishing educational materials after they had fallen for a phishing email, spent more than twice as much time studying the materials than those who were presented the materials without first being tricked. Those who were presented the materials without being tricked were no better at identifying phishing emails than those who received no anti-phishing educational materials. A week later, when the exercise was repeated, those in the embedded training group were significantly more successful in identifying phishing emails than those in the other two groups 64 percent of phishing emails identified by the embedded training group versus 7 percent identified by the other two groups......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

October 1, 2007, 10:16 PM CT

Computers to 'read the minds' of users

Tufts University scientists are in the process of developing techniques that could allow computers to respond to users thoughts of frustration too much work or boredomtoo little work. Applying non-invasive and easily portable imaging technology in new ways, they hope to gain real-time insight into the brains more subtle emotional cues and help provide a more efficient way to get work done.

New evaluation techniques that monitor user experiences while working with computers are increasingly necessary, said Robert Jacob, computer science professor and researcher. One moment a user may be bored, and the next moment, the same user may be overwhelmed. Measuring mental workload, frustration and distraction is typically limited to qualitatively observing computer users or to administering surveys after completion of a task, potentially missing valuable insight into the users changing experiences.

Sergio Fantini, biomedical engineering professor, in conjunction with Jacobs human-computer interaction (HCI) group, is studying functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology that uses light to monitor brain blood flow as a proxy for workload stress a user may experience when performing an increasingly difficult task. A $445,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will allow the interdisciplinary team to incorporate real-time biomedical data with machine learning to produce a more in-tune computer user experience......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:33:46 GMT

What Would Life Be Without Google?

Before the discovery of computers and other cutting-edge technology, life was pretty simple. Activities of people include sleeping, eating, and working. Now that modern allies are discovered, most of the populace could not live a day without the help of computers and the Net. Activities are just as affected. This is the very reason why people are accustomed to web search engines.

Among the major search engines, Google has influenced a significant percentage of Netizens. As a fact, many of them believe that the world of web search engine optimization starts and ends with Google. Unfortunately, we are involved in SEO in general not just Google SEO in particular.

You might react: Google gets most of the attention.

Yes, very true. That is an undisputed fact. But you have to consider other search engines. With emphasis on Google, it will be easy to overlook other key players. Subconsciously, you might have eliminated other search engines in optimizing web pages. And that is a dangerous thing to do.

There are 2 main reasons why marketing managers should not ignore Yahoo!, MSN and even Ask: Varied demographics and lesser competition.

Google isn't the only search engine around. Comscore data revealed that Google has half of the US search engine traffic, Yahoo! gets a quarter and MSN gets a tenth. These are all big numbers. In July Google had 4 billion searches, Yahoo! had 2 and MSN had 1.1. These figures are not to be disregarded. Posted by: noel      Read more     Source

September 12, 2007, 8:21 PM CT

Computer poetry pushes the genre envelope

What happens to poetry in the Digital Age? In one of the first academic works in the field, Swedish researcher Maria Engberg has studied how the ability of the computer to combine words, images, movement, and sounds is impacting both writing and reading.

The dissertation, to be publicly defended on September 14, has been jointly submitted at Uppsala University and the Blekinge Institute of Technology.

The way digital poetry experiments with language raises questions and challenges conceptions of literature that were formed by printed books, says Maria Engberg, who has examined what this entails for literary scholarship.

She has analyzed works by English-speaking poets such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Thomas Swiss. The focus is on space, time, movement, and word and image constructions. The poems were written, or rather created, with the help of computer technology and published on the Internet or CDs, for instance. Some of the works can be experienced as three-dimensional installations, created in space using so-called vr-cubes and augmented-reality environments. Maria Engberg examines how the forms of the poems construct different reader roles that challenge traditional views of poetry and reading, formed by the visual conventions of the printed page......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

September 12, 2007, 8:18 PM CT

Qubits poised to reveal our secrets

IT MIGHT seem like an esoteric achievement of interest to only a handful of computer scientists, but the advent of quantum computers that can run a routine called Shors algorithm could have profound consequences. It means the most dangerous threat posed by quantum computing - the ability to break the codes that protect our banking, business and e-commerce data - is now a step nearer reality.

Adding to the worry is the fact that this feat has been performed by not one but two research groups, independently of each other. One team is led by Andrew White at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and the other by Chao-Yang Lu of the University of Science and Technology of China, in Hefei. Both groups have built rudimentary laser-based quantum computers that can implement Shors algorithm - a mathematical routine capable of defeating todays most common encryption systems, such as RSA.

RSA is an example of public key cryptography, in which a user holds a pair of mathematically related strings of data, known as a public key and a private key. The public key is widely distributed and used to encrypt messages, while the private key is kept secret and used to decrypt them. An attacker who does not have the private key needs to work out the two very large prime numbers which, multiplied together, make up the public key. Find those factors and you can work out the private key. RSAs security rests on the extreme difficulty of doing this: todays digital computers are just not powerful enough to find the factors of a large key in any practical length of time......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

September 12, 2007, 7:08 PM CT

Image-search tool speaks hundreds of languages

From the fall of the Tower of Babel to the Esperanto global language movement, a number of humans have dreamed of sharing a common tongue. Despite the Internet's promise of global communication, language barriers remain. Even pictures on the Web get lost in translation.

"Images are universal, but image search is not," said Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. "A person who types his or her search in English won't find images tagged in Chinese, and a Dutch person won't find images tagged in English. We've created a collaborative tool that solves this problem."

A new multilingual search tool developed at the UW's Turing Center makes the universal appeal of pictures available to all. PanImages, presented today at the Machine Translation Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, allows people to search for images on the Web using hundreds of languages.

Search engines such as Google look for images by detecting the search term in captions and other nearby text. But since the process looks for a string of letters, the results are limited to the seeker's mother tongue.

The new tool is named PanImages, from the Greek prefix, "pan," meaning whole or all-inclusive. It automatically translates the search term into about 300 other languages, suggests a few that might work and then displays images from Google and the online photo database Flickr......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source