algorithms
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Google's Amit Singhal tells us about the dreams search engines are made of
Do Googlers dream of electric algorithms? For a little insight into what makes the search engine that became a verb tick, we recently attended a talk by Amit Singhal, one of its chief engineers. Amit is part of the team in charge of tweaking and improving Google's ranking algorithms and has 20 years of experience when it comes to sorting through data, with that time split into even decades spent within the academic sphere and over in Mountain View. What he had to tell us mostly revolved around his aspirations from when he started out back in 1990, but it's the way that Google has acted to meet each of those goals that's the fun and interesting stuff (or as we like to call it around here, the meat). So do put on your reading monocle and join us past the break.%Gallery-97608%
Xerox wants to extract demographic information from web surfers
The age of Big Brother everywhere is certainly upon us, and while we've seen (or at least heard of) tracking devices being implanted in the most unusual of places, it looks like Xerox is hoping to join the devilish fray. In an attempt to craft a demographic extractor to garner marketing dollars galore, a recently filed patent application spells out a system that utilizes software (and potentially hardware) to map users to "centroid vectors" which would determine a person's age, sex, and other "private" information simply based on their website visits. Interestingly, test cases are reportedly showing a respectable "75-percent accuracy rate" so long as a "sufficient number of pages were visited." Still, we can't imagine any tracing technology would be lawfully allowed behind the backs of law-abiding citizens (right?), but considering that even your TiVo has the potential to sell your soul to lucrative ad agencies, we wouldn't put it past 'em.[Via ArsTechnica]
University of Essex developing autonomous model car
DARPA's Grand Challenge certainly snags a majority of the spotlight when talking about autonomous vehicles, but researchers at the University of Essex are looking to tackle the idea on a (literally) smaller scale. Seeking to craft a "driverless model car," the project will reportedly utilize a standard remote control model vehicle, which will be flanked by a PC, camcorder, and a bevy of sensors. Supposedly, the software that will be riding on board will allow the vehicle to be "entirely autonomous" by recognizing obstacles, making tactical decisions, and driving itself around a test track. The team responsible for the prototype hopes that this small-scale, low-cost endeavor will "pave the way" for autopilot cars of the future, and considering the problems we mere humans are already having with newfangled technology, that day can't come soon enough.[Via Slashdot]
Real-life Minority Report: software for predicting murderers
Obviously the best way to prevent recidivism among violent criminals would be to simply imprison them for life following their first offense (we'd call it the "one strike and you're out" law), but thanks to that antiquated document known as the Constitution, we're forced to coddle convicts by ensuring that they don't endure "cruel and unusual punishment" to pay for their crimes. Well if we can't lock up all the muggers, jaywalkers, or tax cheats and just throw away the key, the next best option would seem to be predicting criminal behavior before it happens -- and though it sounds like straight-up science fiction, that's exactly what University of Pennsylvania criminologist Richard Berk intends to do. Using a data set consisting of 30 to 40 variables derived from anonymous Philadelphia probation department cases over a two-year period, Berk and his colleagues were able to craft an algorithm that supposedly separates those folks likely to re-offend from ex-cons not deemed to be as dangerous. The point of this program is not to make an end run around sentence limitations or to arrest people before they've committed a crime, but rather, to help probation units decide how to best allocate their resources among hundreds of potential re-offenders. To wit, each subject's variables are plugged into the software in order to create a so-called "lethality score" -- and although the aggregated data is still relatively small, Berk points out that childhood exposure to violence has already floated to the top as the single most likely predictor of murder. Another, less well-known, but equally accurate predictor: jailhouse tattoo across an inmate's chest that reads "Die, ___, Die."[Via Slashdot]
Samsung's new mobile DDI promises better daylight viewing
Samsung has just revealed a new mobile display driver IC (DDI) which claims to deliver clearer images in broad daylight, and while this sounds like a promising development, we're gonna wait to see it in action before passing judgment. What makes this so-called "intelligent" DDI different from the ones currently driving LCD screens is that it contains a built-in photo sensor that detects 32 levels of ambient light and uses a proprietary algorithm developed in conjunction with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology to adjust properties such as brightness and saturation at the individual pixel level. Basically, the new DDI promises to optimize display viewing in direct sunlight while at the same time reducing power consumption by ramping down the brightness in lower-light environments. Our skepticism stems from the fact that this tech doesn't sound like it really does anything to combat sun glare, and since we always keep our brightness maxed out anyway, we're not sure how much benefit we'd get from an auto-adjusting screen. Like we said, though, we'll wait until we see one of these Samsung-powered displays in action before completely dismissing its effectiveness, and it sounds like we won't have to wait too long, either -- mass production of the new mobile DDIs is scheduled to begin before the end of the year.[Via Digital World Tokyo]
Researchers develop algorithm to combat photo blur
Since it's unlikely that your hand will get any steadier with age, and we probably won't see optical image stabilization in cameraphones anytime soon, researchers are concentrating on ways to fix your crappy photos once they've already been captured. The latest salvo in the war against so-called hand motion blur comes from a team of computer scientists at MIT and the University of Toronto, who have developed an algorithm that can create a sharper picture by "estimating the distribution of a number of probable images" and coming up with a happy medium. Introduced at this year's Siggraph Conference in Boston, the algorithm could potentially be included in future versions of Adobe Photoshop -- which currently fights blur with a rather ineffective unsharp mask tool -- although it will do nothing for blurring caused by moving objects or improperly-focused shots. Unfortunately, it sounds like this product is still at least a year away from commercial release, so tripods and nerve-steadying Pentazemin are still your best bets for the time being.[Thanks, Alex]
Software lets neighbors securely share WiFi bandwidth
Instead of fighting about property lines and whose dog is keeping everyone up at night, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign want you and your neighbors to get together and share your WiFi signal in a method that supposedly delivers better performance to each individual user. Assistant computer science professor Haiyun Luo and graduate student Nathanael Thompson of the school's Systems, Wireless, and Networking Group have released a free download that analyzes local airwaves and exploits unused bandwidth from one network to complement ones experiencing heavy usage, but always gives users priority access to their own signal. Part of the two-year-old PERM project, the application uses flow-scheduling algorithms to determine bandwidth allocation, and has so-far undergone testing on Linux clients and with Linksys routers. Security is obviously a key concern in such a sharing setup, so PERM developed the software to both "preserve a user's privacy and security, and mitigate the free-riding problem."[Via PCWorld]
Microsoft's Photo2Search for cameraphone queries
In one of the most ambitious projects to date for associating real-world objects with digital information about them, a team from Microsoft Research Asia is in the final stages of developing a platform for photo-based searches. Rather straightforwardly called Photo2Search, the technology was developed against the backdrop of a growing cameraphone market, whose widespread adoption is bringing portable computing to the masses but whose limited input options continue to deliver a frustrating search experience. Project leader Xing Xie came up with the idea for a database that could be queried via texted or emailed phone pics in late 2004, but at the time both machine-based photo identification and computer-vision algorithms were too slow and rudimentary to suit their needs. Over a year of work has refined the technology to make it faster, but more importantly, relevant -- unlike older software, Xie's version is now able to discern features that allow it to match specific objects and not just those which share similar characteristics. Unfortunately there are no immediate plans for rolling out this technology to consumers (it's still not quite ready for primetime, apparently), but since most of today's phones produce photos that are little more than a pixelated mess, we're probably not quite ready either.[Via picturephoning and MocoNews]
Kensington laptop dock first to feature startup's multiple-monitors-over-USB tech
Although we're pretty sure that many of you wouldn't agree with Newnham Research CEO Michael Ledzion's assertion that "connecting a graphics card to a PC is hard, and expensive," you might still be interested in his company's technology for connecting multiple displays to a PC through a standard USB connection, which will debut in a Kensington laptop dock in June. The Cambridge, England-based startup is able to achieve this rather amazing feat through a hardware rendering engine call NIVO, which can either be built directly into a monitor or incorporated into other peripherals, and which uses proprietary compression algorithms to deliver video up to 1280 x 1024 at 75Hz. As you could probably guess, this technology isn't designed for gaming -- the company suggests using it to display "largely static images" -- although it's supposedly capable of HD playback, which is something we'd definitely like to see firsthand.[Via Extreme Tech]
