Thursday, May 14, 2015

"Wolfram has created a website that will identify any image you throw at it"

From The Verge:
And it's learning as you do it
One of the most amazing things you can do with Wolfram Alpha is ask it what planes are overhead. If you're on your phone, it will pull your location, then cross reference that with a database of flights, including their altitude, angle, and even their flight number and aircraft type. But in many ways, Stephen Wolfram's latest search tool is more impressive. It's designed to identify anything in a picture. You just upload a photo, and get a computer-generated guess just a few seconds later.

"It won’t always get it right, but most of the time I think it does remarkably well," Wolfram writes. "And to me what’s particularly fascinating is that when it does get something wrong, the mistakes it makes mostly seem remarkably human." In some brief testing, that's a pretty fair assessment. I plugged in things like Yosemite National Park's Half Dome and was told it was "elevation," while a photo of a gecko was identified as a "night lizard." Remarkably though, it identified a picture of a cow as "black angus," and two cups of ice cream as "frozen yogurt." Close enough.
 The system was trained with cats, sloths, and Chewbacca
How all this ascends beyond assaulting a website with photos of your last vacation or what's in your kitchen, is tantalizing. Wolfram says he imagines the project could be useful if applied to large collections of photos to attempt to identify and categorize them. The technology can also be used by others to build image identification into their apps. Think about the visual recognition found within Google+'s photos, but in other photo apps and services....MORE
Way back in 2012 we saw "Artificial Intelligence: Why There is No Reason to Fear The Singularity/HAL 9000":
Google researchers and Stanford scientists have discovered that if you show a large enough computing system millions of images from random YouTube videos for three days, the computer will teach itself to recognize ... cats.